Google Now is a core part of Android operating system, and it only works online. But now, it is confirmed that Google is working to update Google Now to bring its voice commands along with other features offline.
Google’s speech recognition relies on cloud computing to work on devices. So, the device should be connected to The Internet. As it requires huge processing power and memory to work, Google has been using cloud servers for this. But recent report confirms that Google Engineers have built a new machine learning techniques to run it in the smartphone.
Also see: Google Now gets voice commands to send message to WhatsApp, Viber, and other messaging apps
This research paper got title “PERSONALIZED SPEECH RECOGNITION ON MOBILE DEVICES”. It describes a large vocabulary speech recognition system that is accurate and has low latency and yet has a small enough memory and computational footprint to run faster than real-time on a Nexus 5 Android smartphone. It only takes 20.3 MB storage which is almost negligible amount when we have devices coming with 16 GB and 32 GB of internal storage
To train this system, researchers have used approximately 2,000 hours of anonymized Google voice search traffic. They also added noise from YouTube to imitate real-life conditions.
After this update, you will just say “Ok Google” and it will respond faster because it will not require data connection.
It will be very interesting to see the Google Now offline functionality. This will be an important update for people using Android in emerging markets like India and Indonesia. We do not have any confirmed information when this will be available on our Android phones. But we can expect something in upcoming Android N.
What do you think about this Google Now offline? Share your views with us in comments.
