Google says its voice search is faster, hears you better in noisy environments

25.09.2015
Google’s voice search is quicker and can hear you better over background noise thanks to recent under-the-hood improvements.

That’s what the company says in a new blog post that details how it has ramped up performance of its search app on Android and iOS

Google is using a technology called a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to more accurately identify what you’re saying and ignore other sounds that aren’t part of the search query. 

The improvements also were designed to find the right balance between more accurate predictions and lower latency. Google needs to listen more closely to hear what you’re saying, but there’s not much benefit if that takes longer to process.

The speedier search performance is already live in Google’s search apps, so perhaps it’d be worth trying out more voice queries to see if you notice a difference.

Why this matters: Google’s voice search capabilities have more competition than ever. Apple keeps improving Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana and Soundhound’s Hound are also pushing into this space. With all this competition, search is bound to only get better.

(www.greenbot.com)

Derek Walter