Google Now, Google’s equivalent to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s Siri and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Cortana is bound to make new improvements shortly. The feature will not require an internet connection for use shortly.
In a recently published research paper by Google, they showed that it is possible to use your phone’s personal assistant without connecting to the internet. The researchers at Google are working on creating a new, personalized system for voice commands along with dictation. The research team used around 2,000 hours of recorded and anonymized Google voices which come from the search traffic. A number of requests totaled at more than a 100 million. To create a real-life scenario they also used some background noises which they took from YouTube.
The version that the team came up with not only runs efficiently faster from the user’s smartphone but is way better compared to the current version of Google Now on the Nexus 5 right now. By applying several complex computational and compression models, the system they came up with can run seven times faster. The improved and researched version is also a step in the right direction storage wise. The version only takes 20.3 MB of storage, which essentially is negligible since most phones have a capacity ranging from at least 8GB to 16 GB of on board storage.
The paper states that the results obtained are primarily based on two distinct domains which are dictation and voice commands. The company experimented with language model interpolation techniques that enabled the ability to share a single model across both domains. This was so as to keep the disk space low. The system has learnt as it goes since the system is based on machine learning and it adapts to users demands and his preferences.
The new system, however, won’t be able to tell you scores updates without an internet connection; it can still do much more. One example is, it can send an email to someone on your contact list or can turn your Wi-Fi on and off for you. The system is also able to handle proper names and other device-specific information for tasks. For many of the people who have Google Now at present one of their many frustrations is that they have not been able to use offline functionality, so to see Google do something has to be refreshing.
Google has said they plan to present what they have found at the 41st International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, in Shanghai on March 20.
's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana is bound to make new improvements shortly.){kind=link}