Google Home Smart Speaker Adds Multi-User Support Via Personalized Voice Recognition

by Brandon Hill — Thursday, April 20, 2017, 03:10 PM EDT

If you own a Google Home speaker, it has just became a little bit more useful. Google today announced that it has enabled support for multiple users on the smart speaker, confirming what was leaked earlier this month within the device’s smartphone app.

Google has enhanced Google Home by allowing up to six people to attach their accounts to the device. Most importantly, Google Home will automatically distinguish your voice from that of your other family members (or roommates), so that when you say “OK Google”, only results pertaining to your account preferences are played back.

So how does Google identify your voice and match it to your account? It all comes down to the company’s powerful neural networks which analyze how you say the phrases “OK Google” or “Hey Google”. This “training” process takes place when you link your account to Google Home.

“Those phrases are then analyzed by a neural network, which can detect certain characteristics of a person's voice,” writes Google Assistant Product Manager Yury Pinsky. “The neural network will compare the sound of your voice to its previous analysis so it can understand if it's you speaking or not. This comparison takes place only on your device, in a matter of milliseconds.”

Amazon is widely regarded as being the most full-featured and capable of all the AI smart speakers on the market with its Echo family, but multi-user support on the Google Home gives the search giant a key advantage over its rivals.

Google says that multi-user support is arriving today for U.S. users, and will be enabled in the United Kingdom “in the coming months”.

Tags: Google, (nasdaq:goog), google home

Brandon Hill

Brandon received his first PC, an IBM Aptiva 310, in 1994 and hasn’t looked back since. He cut his teeth on computer building/repair working at a mom and pop computer shop as a plucky teen in the mid 90s and went on to join AnandTech as the Senior News Editor in 1999. Brandon would later help to form DailyTech where he served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008 until 2014. Brandon is a tech geek at heart, and family members always know where to turn when they need free tech support. When he isn’t writing about the tech hardware or studying up on the latest in mobile gadgets, you’ll find him browsing forums that cater to his long-running passion: automobiles.

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