Both Amazon and Google have recently improved how their Voice Assistants sound. Amazon added additional reading styles and Google added two new English voices. You can read about the improvements that Amazon made in a previous blog post titled “The Voices are Getting Better”. In this blog post, we will focus on recent improvements Google made to how Google Assistant sounds. For Google Actions, Google previously provided four English voices, two male voices, and two female voices. Google recently added two additional voices for a total of six-voice options. The two new voices sound significantly more natural.
Let’s hear what they sound like.
First, Let's Compare Old versus New
To be able to hear the improvement, let’s listen to the original voices. The following are examples of Google Assistant starting to read the blog post titled, “How Does Voice Technology Work: An Introduction”.
Here is the original Google Female Voice:
And here is the original Google Male Voice:
While these voices are easy to understand, it is clear they are computer-generated. While these voices are fine to listen to short answers, they aren’t as pleasant listening to a monolog. With Google’s newest addition to their voice library, the new voices sound much more natural.
Now, listen to the newest Google Female Voice:
And here is the newest Google Male Voice:
As you can hear, these new voices are more natural. It’s clear, Google is committed to making Google Assistant easier to listen to as we get used to talking with the Google Assistant.
Try it out on other Blogs
These new voices make listening to things like blog posts much easier. In fact, all the blogs supported by the Create My Voice team already use these new voices. If you are listening to this blog post on your Google device, you are experiencing the new male voice. If you want to hear other blogs which use the new female voice, try one of the following:
“Hey Google, Talk to Spring Insight”.
“Hey Google, Talk to Love Built Life”.
“Hey Google, Talk to 7 Sisters Homeschool Blog”.
If you have a blog, contact the team at Create My Voice, to start using Voice Assistant platforms to connect with your audience.
Google Still Needs to Catch-up with Amazon Alexa
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Amazon Alexa came out with new reading styles earlier this year. You can hear these new reading styles, just ask your Alexa Voice Assistant by saying:
“Alexa, ask Create My Voice to read Blog Post 32”.
In addition to the new reading styles, Amazon Alexa also supports the SSML, voice tag. SSML stands for “Synthetic Speech Markup Language”. The super cool thing about the SSML voice tag, is the ability to change voices dynamically. In essence, you can create a conversation right inside a blog post. This may be hard to conceptualize, to hear how this works, you can read about it in the post “Bringing Life to Your Content”, or better, just say:
“Alexa, ask Create My Voice to read blog post 27”.
Currently, Google Assistant does not support the SSML voice tag, so it's way more interesting to listen to post 27 on an Amazon Alexa device. Hopefully, Google will follow Amazon’s lead and continue to improve the voice options for Google Assistant.
Remember, next, just say:
“Read blog post 27”, and then when that post is done, just say “Read blog post 32”.
