Very recently this past winter break, I had been fortunate enough to get a new phone, a Google Pixel. In short, the Pixel is the first phone by Google, a phone made by Google. Aside from the more-than-often comments of, “Did you get an iPhone??” (no...), the phone has many upgraded features that were not found on my old phone, including a better battery (sure...), a better camera (happy tear), and one of my favorites, Google Assistant. Google Assistant is to Android as Siri is to Apple. But it’s not. At least not completely. What I love about Google Assistant is that she is actually helpful.
Speech recognition is a very tricky thing. It may be cool to talk to your phone, (“Give me directions to the nearest coffee shop”), but a lot of times it isn’t socially appropriate. Imagine you’re with your group of friends and one of them starts speaking to their phone and asking them to look for pictures of memes. I still remember those awkward moments at family gatherings when my dad would ask his phone to search for something, only to have the phone say, “I didn’t understand.” And then he would repeat the process, two, maybe even three times. Daddy, please just manually type in the search bar...
And often times, after repeating myself multiple times, I would get frustrated at the speech recognition’s inability to comprehend me (“Call mom. No, I said call mom. CALL MOM. ... Forget it.”), and would then just physically do what I had wanted to do initially, tapping my phone very vigorously in annoyance. Everytime this happened, I realized, the amount of time it took me to try to get my phone to do what I wanted by trying to tell it what to do, I could have done myself much more efficiently. To me, talking to your phone and asking it to do things for you was always more of a gimmick, it was never really that accurate and it was slow and inefficient. Eventually to me, Siri, S Voice, etc., became more of something that I would play with occasionally, messing around with it and asking it weird and random things to see what it would respond. Once they said, “I don’t understand”, I went bah humbug and shut it off.
Google Assistant is not like this though. She’s smart, fast, and best of all, useful. No longer is speech recognition a gimmick. It’s actually a powerful feature and tool to utilize. When I’m getting ready in the morning, at my closet, I ask, “Okay Google, what’s the weather like today?”, to which my phone recognizes my specific voice, unlocks from across the room, searches up the weather, and reports it back to me, “Fairly sunny with a high of 65.” To which I go, “Thanks!”, and she says, “You’re welcome.” D’aww, that makes me happy.
I can ask her to call my grandma, open up an app, play a song on Spotify. It’s crazy how fast it works. One time I told her to send a text message to my sister, and she asked for confirmation of the final message, to which I said, “No that’s good, send it.”. And she sent it! Before, with speech recognition, you would have to be very precise in the language you would use, forcing you to speak like a robot, or else it wouldn’t work. I love how I can speak colloquially to Google Assistant and have her understand! Yay for colloquial!!
She is also very funny. Ask her to make you a sandwich and she’ll play a magic sound effect and go, “Poof! You’re a sandwich!” Get it? Get it? You can even ask her about Siri, her supposed “voice assistant rival”, and she’ll say, “You know Siri? What a small world. Hope she’s doing well.” Ha ha ha. How very civil of her. The amount of laughing crying emojis I wanted to insert into this paragraph is insane.
Google has packed a lot into Google Assistant. You’re bored? Ask her to play a game and she’ll pull up a bunch of games built into the phone (no external downloading!) that you can pick and play. Once I chose to play a trivia game, where she tested my knowledge on random facts. She acted as the game show host, complete with audience background sound effects and game show music! She’d ask me questions, to which the speech recognition would be turned on and I would say my answer. And very randomly but to my immense amusement, she dubbed me "Tater Tot" throughout the entire game. Unfortunately I did not do very well... Luckily there are still other games she has offered that I have yet to play, so not all is lost.
Because Google Assistant is so convenient now to use, I find myself going, “Okay, Google”, multiple times a day. Speaking to my phone now is no longer awkward, but in fact, very natural. But the more I utilized Google Assistant, the lazier I found myself becoming. Because it was so easy to ask my phone to do stuff, in the cases when I actually needed to physically interact with my phone, often it would not be within arm’s reach, but would be somewhere across the room. Somewhere that would require me to walk to it to get it. There were so many times when I wanted to say, “Okay Google, bring the phone to me.” (Sometimes I would even go into full Harry Potter mode and be tempted to say, “Okay Google, accio phone”). But unfortunately even Google Assistant, as smart as she is, is not capable of sprouting legs and walking to me. A girl can wish... I’m very lazy by nature, and Google Assistant has exacerbated that.
It’s amazing how fast technology is progressing. Who would have known a few years ago that speech recognition would be at the level it is today? Who would have known that Google would have become so advanced? Who would have known that Google Assistant would have become so near and dear to me?
Of course, not everything is perfect yet. If you ask her to identify a song, she’ll go, “I can’t identify songs yet.”, which makes her feel like a beta version, incomplete. And the one time I was feeling sentimental and alone, and had only her for company, this is how she treated me:
When your only friend doesn’t reciprocate... But I’m confident in time the Google developers will make her understand. Heh.
Go talk to Google Assistant. She is very cool. She has changed my life by making things run so much more efficiently all with just the command of my voice. Now if only she could tell me to exercise...
