cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
KiiFromGoogle
Community Manager (Admin)
Community Manager (Admin)

Hi everyone, 

 

As smart home enthusiasts, we all have a special relationship with our Google Assistant. It’s part of our homes, and issuing a command is now second-nature. With that in mind, the Assistant team has worked hard to apply state of the art improvements in AI to how Assistant understands your commands to control your home. 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. Examples of these improvements include:

 

Better device recognition by type:

For commands like “Turn the fan off” or “Kitchen lights on”, Assistant is now able to better match your request to the devices in your home based on their type and which room the device you’re talking to is in.

 

Better device recognition by name:

When your command doesn’t exactly match the name of your device, Assistant will now more reliably match to the expected device in your home for names that approximately or partially match your device name. For example, “Turn the lamp off” may match to a device in your home named “bedroom lamp”, and “Turn on the stair light” will better match a light named “stairs”.

 

Better targeting of actions and where they should occur:

Assistant is now better able to determine what specific action to take on your device and where that action should happen. For example, “Have the vacuum clean the kitchen, living room, and dining room” is now able to more accurately understand the specific areas of your home you are referring to.

 

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. 

 

Smart Home Voice Commands.png

 

We Need Your Feedback

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. We understand it can be frustrating when a command you’ve been using to control your home no longer behaves the way you intend. After extensive testing, we’re slowly and carefully releasing these new changes to groups of users at different times, and want to monitor outcomes along the way so that we can refine our models appropriately. If you have feedback for us with examples of what is no longer working, we invite you to share this with us in the community’s Home Automation forum

 

We’re very excited about the transition to AI for the control of smart devices and the improvements to Assistant that it will enable in the future. Our team will continue working hard to ensure Assistant is able to understand you the way you naturally and most comfortably speak.

18 Comments