John Legend Is Lending His Voice to Google Assistant

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Tuesday during the company's annual I/O developer conference that it is adding six new voices for its virtual assistant, including that of R&B star John Legend. The voices will be available for phones, Google Home smart speakers, and other devices. Pichai told the audience this was possible due to a breakthrough six months ago from Google's DeepMind A.I. team in its WaveNet technology, which stiches together speech recordings by analyzing the underlying raw audio to create a realistic-sounding voice. A video ran on the conference stage showing Legend recording phrases that might be useful for Google Assistant in the company's studio. "Couscous: a type of North a type of North African semolina in granules made from crushed durum wheat," Legend says at one point, appearing to be reading the definition from the Google Dictionary.