{"id":338897,"date":"2017-04-21T00:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T16:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1479295"},"modified":"2017-04-21T00:00:22","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T16:00:22","slug":"google-home-can-now-recognize-up-to-six-voices-and-give-personalized-responses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/google-home-can-now-recognize-up-to-six-voices-and-give-personalized-responses\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Home can now recognize up to six voices and give personalized responses"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Google Home is\u00a0finally getting a feature<\/a> that its users have been clamoring for since it launched last year: it can now distinguish between different voices and respond with personalized responses. Until now, you could only connect a single account to a Google Home, and that meant you could only get info about one person\u2019s calendar, for example. If you\u2019re single or don\u2019t have roommates, that\u2019s perfectly fine, but the moment you live with somebody else, that\u2019s a pretty obvious problem.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>With today\u2019s update, which should be rolling out in the U.S. as you read this (and which is coming to the U.K. in the coming months), up to six people can share a Google Home. So now,\u00a0when you ask your morning commute, you\u2019ll get the info about your route and not your spouse\u2019s. The same goes for playlists, schedules, shopping lists, travel info and every other kind of personalized information you\u2019d want to ask you Google Assistant about.<\/p>\n

The process of training your Google Home to understand different voices is pretty straightforward. Once this feature is available, you\u2019ll see a card in the Google Home app that tells you that \u201cmulti-users is available.\u201d Then, new users can link their Google accounts to the Home and train the Assistant to recognize them by speaking the \u201cOK Google\u201d or \u201cHey Google\u201d wake word\u00a0a few times so Google\u2019s neural network can learn the sound of their voice.<\/p>\n

While Google didn\u2019t have any official comment about this, this new feature may also finally open up a path to bringing some of the\u00a0Google Assistant features like creating notes, reminders and events that are currently missing on Home (but available on Android, for example). Those features didn\u2019t make much sense on a device that, while inherently communal, could only recognize a single voice.<\/p>\n

Maybe this also opens up room for a feature that Google showed in its launch video at its I\/O developer conference last year but also never launched: proactive alerts. Right now, Google Home is mostly a passive device that waits for your commands. Unlike the Assistant (and previously Google Now), it doesn\u2019t alert you when it\u2019s time to leave for the airport, for example. The ability to recognize different voices means some (though not all) of the privacy concerns some people may have around this feature\u00a0could not be solved (though this would go beyond recognizing who speaks a wake word).<\/p>\n