Google Assistant Upgrades Smart Home Voice Commands

Google Assistant has begun rolling out improvements to its understanding of smart home device voice commands. The voice assistant used large-scale neural networks to anticipate what a user wants without requiring specific wording of the commands.

Contextual Commands

The improved AI has a better understanding of what type of devices people refer to, using clues like what room the user is in when they request a fan or light to switch on. The same goes for identifying the name of the device. Google Assistant can learn that requests that refer to just part of an official name so that tasking to turn on the “stair light” will prompt the voice assistant to turn on the light with the name “stairs” even if that’s not what the user actually said. The most notable reach of the AI’s prediction comes with grasping what device and action to focus on for a broad request. Google’s example describes someone asking the voice assistant to “have the vacuum clean the kitchen, living room, and dining room,” and the AI knowing that those are the rooms to send the robotic vacuum into. The enhanced AI may make some existing commands no longer work, however.

“In the coming weeks, you may notice that there’s greater flexibility to ask your Google Assistant to control the devices in your home and get the outcomes you want,” Google explained in a blog post. “These and other improvements in understanding are made possible by large scale neural networks that learn from examples to predict the most accurate action to take given a user’s command. This new approach means that the way Assistant reacts to your commands to control your home devices may change from what you’re used to, and it’s even possible that some commands that worked in the past may no longer work.”

Google Homemaking

The improved AI follows other efforts by Google to upgrade its smart home offerings, including a revamped version of the Home app designed for more customization and to streamline adding new devices based on the Matter standard. The updated Google Home app offers automatic detection and setup for smart home devices and the Fast Pair feature to connect them to the network. There are also more choices for how and when smart devices behave based on multiple conditions, including time, temperature, vocal commands, or other interactions with the devices. Along with the existing options of tying routines to certain times or vocal commands for Google Assistant, users can now connect them to the operations of other smart devices. Pressing a doorbell or passing in front of a motion sensor can now be used as the starting command for the routine.

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