Google voice search is now much faster and more accurate

Voice commands can be frustratingly and hilariously inaccurate at times, as anyone who done a voice search on their smartphone can tell you, but it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. Google revealed in a recent blog post that its researchers have improved the company’s voice search feature on Android and iOS to be much more accurate, even when you’re in a noisy environment. 

Google says improvements to its voice search make it more accurate, even in noisy environments. Google has detailed a number of improvements to the acoustic models its app on iOS and Android rely on to recognise spoken words more efficiently – for example, when users ask for directions to the nearest restaurant or put questions that can be searched on the web. With the improvements, Google can recognise with greater accuracy what’s being said, even in noisy surroundings, while requiring lower computational resources to analyse sounds in real-time, according to the company’s speech team. According to the researchers, the type of “recurrent neural network” (RNN) Google is using for its acoustic models can memorise information better than deep neural networks and model “temporal dependencies”. For example, the word ‘museum’ in phonetic notation would be translated to /m j u z i @ m/.