Google’s new Assistant voices are now live

There is plenty going on from Google this week as Google I/O continues through tomorrow. Yesterday, during the I/O keynote, Google announced six new voices for Google Assistant. Today, those voices are now live in the Google Assistant preferences.

The new voices were all synthesized from WaveNet, which makes Holly’s voice possible. Yes, ‘Holly’ is the official name of Google Assistant’s current default voice. There are three new male voices and three new female voices. Each one is a different pitch and speed might vary slightly between voices.

To see if you like any of these voices better than the default, head to the Google App and look for the menu and hit “Settings”, then go to “Google Assistant Settings” and tap “Preferences”. Now you can tap “Assistant voice” and test out Voices 1 through 8.

It’s worth noting that the new voices only work with English at the moment. Although we were able to scroll through the new Voice entries, only the first two voices would play a sample. We tried this in Spanish (US), it turns out this language doesn’t work with Google Assistant. We tried with French, which is officially a Google Assistant Language, but we were also unable to get it to speak in the new voices, the app told us there was a connection error.

If you use Google Assistant in another language, or English UK/AU, try the above steps and let us know in the comments if you can test out the new Assistant voices.

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