Google Assistant will finally learn to pronounce your contacts’ names correctly

Google Assistant is great for knowing weather forecasts, checking scores of my favorite sports teams, or asking it to show nearby restaurants. But one of my huge complaints with it is that when I try to call a contact, it would often fail to recognize their name.

I live in India, and because of the diverse nature of the country names, people in my contacts and their pronunciations vary a lot. So it might be hard for Google Assistant to correctly identify all of them every single time.

To solve this problem, Google is rolling out a new update to the Assistant, which lets you teach it the pronunciation of specific contacts. This update will give you an option to either record your own voice or spell out the pronunciation. Check out how the feature works in the video below:

Once you record it, the Assistant will recognize that name the way you speak it.

This new tool is part of Google Assistant’s upgrade that also brings a better understanding of context through the company’s BERT language model, accurate ways to set and cancel multiple timers, and improved contextual conversations.

Currently, the name learning feature will be available in English, and the company aims to expand it to other languages soon. Google said that this function will be available to users in the next few days, and we’ll surely write a guide on how to use it.