Google Now could soon recognise voice commands even in off-line mode, based on a paper by researchers from the company.
Google Now or the AI voice-command feature that we’ve all come to use on our Android smartphones, could work even in offline mode, according to a research paper put out by a team of Google Researchers.
According to a report, speech recognition heavily relies on cloud computing to function optimally. It’s essential as the processing power and memory required is huge. The report reveals that in a recent paper, Google engineers have shared how they used deep machine learning techniques to run a not so heavy speech recognition program that resides on the smartphone.
Essentially Google’s researchers looked at how they could embed a “large vocabulary speech recognition system”, which is accurate, has low latency, doesn’t use up too much memory power on a Nexus 5 phone.
The paper notes that currently running voice-commands and dictations require constant and fast internet connectivity, something that might soon be a thing of the past if the new system is implemented.
According to a report, Google used 2,000 hours of anonymised Google voice search traffic encompassing roughly 100 million requests, and added YouTube background noise to better simulate real-life conditions. The report adds that since the system relies on machine learning, the more it’s used the better it will get at anticipating user needs, preferences and habits.
If speech recognition is available for offline use, it would enable companies to make the feature faster on smartphones, since the voice data will not have to be sent back to Google’s servers. In addition, it may also be more power efficient and should enable new features for smartphones. That said, being offline, it would presumably mean that the various Search-based enquiries will not be available. You can read the entire paper published by the engineers, here.
There have been no details on when the changes will be implemented but one can hope to see some functionalities in the Android N.
Google Now may soon work offline : Reports
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