Continued Conversation Google Home Cannot Find
Google wants Google Assistant to be more conversational, but one of the least conversational aspects of talking to it is a necessary evil. You need to say either "Hey, Google," or "OK, Google" every time you want to give a command to your Google Home smart speaker. You primarily interact with the Home through voice commands, and until now, you had to say those wake words even to ask multiple questions in a row.
Google's new continued conversation feature will keep the Home's microphone enabled for up to 8 seconds after your question, so you can ask more questions without repeating those wake words. The feature was introduced at the Google I/O Developer Conference on May 8th, and it's officially rolling out to customers starting Thursday.
Watch this: Google Assistant can force your kid to say please and...
Keep the conversation going
The continued conversation feature is a setting you can enable in the Google Home app. It's not a mandatory update, so don't fret if you don't want your smart speaker to continue listening after your initial command. Even if the feature is enabled, the mic will shut off early if you follow your question with a "thank you."
You can also ask multiple questions in a single phrase and Google Home will respond to both. For example, you can ask about the weather and your calendar and Google will answer both questions.
Answering two questions at once is actually a separate feature called multiple actions. Google rolled out its multiple actions feature last fall, but the company showed it off again at its developer conference as a natural extension of the new continued conversation feature and recently teased expanding the feature to three straight commands.
Google Assistant is built into both the Google Home speaker family and most recent Android phones, but the continued conversations feature is only available on Google's smart speakers to begin with -- and only in the US for now. Multiple actions is coming to both phones and Home speakers. Both features should work for any of Google Assistant's many capabilities. You can ask Assistant trivia questions, check the weather, update your calendar, control compatible smart home devices and more. (Here's a complete list of Google Home commands.)
Keeping up
Google Assistant is similar to Amazon's digital assistant Alexa, and Google Home works much like the popular Amazon Echo smart speaker. The two companies have been in a back-and-forth feature battle as they vie for the growing smart speaker market.
Alexa can't respond to multiple commands in the same sentence for now, but she does have a feature called follow-up mode, which is functionally the same as continued conversation. With both continued conversation and multiple commands, Google Home could now have an edge in natural conversation on Alexa -- if you actually want the mic to stay hot.
Staying hot
The reason wake words are necessary in the first place is to allow you to command smart speakers without touching them and prevent them from always recording what you're saying. They only record and respond after they hear the correct phrase. With continued conversation, Google Assistant will supposedly be smart enough to only respond if you continue to talk to it, as opposed to someone else in the room. Still, the feature could easily lead to Google Home recording snippets of conversation when you forget the mic is on.
The continued conversation feature is a nice quality of life upgrade, and I appreciate that Google lets you turn it off. I look forward to testing it out this summer to see if it's smart enough to turn itself off when you turn your attention elsewhere.
Google I/O: All our coverage of this year's developer conference.
Google's Duplex could make Assistant the most lifelike AI yet: Experimental technology called Duplex, rolling out soon in a limited release, makes you think you're talking to a real person.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/google-home-continued-conversation-setting-keeps-the-mic-hot/
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