Gboard on Pixel phones now uses an on-device neural network for speech recognition

On-device machine learning algorithms afford plenty of advantages, namely low latency and availability -- because processing is performed locally as opposed to remotely on a server, connectivity has no bearing on performance. Google sees the wisdom in this: It today announced that Gboard, its cross-platform virtual keyboard app, now uses an end-to-end recognizer to power American English speech input on Pixel smartphones. "This means no more network latency or spottiness -- the new recognizer is always available, even when you are offline," Johan Schalkwyk, a fellow on Google's Speech Team, wrote in a blog post. "The model works at the character level, so that as you speak, it outputs words character-by-character, just as if someone was typing out what you say in real-time, and exactly as you'd expect from a keyboard dictation system." It's more complicated than it sounds.