Smart speakers and Smart Displays often sit on the kitchen counter or living room table and are used by more than one member in the household. So we’ve made sure that each person can tweak their preferences for interacting with Google Assistant. When setting up your Google Assistant, you can choose to enable Voice Match and teach Assistant to recognize your voice so you can receive personalized results, like calendar reminders and favorite playlists—even if you share a device with other people in your household.
Now when you set up Voice Match, Google Assistant will prompt you to say full phrases instead of just the hotword “Hey Google.” For example, during Voice Match set up, the Assistant will ask you to say “Hey Google, play my workout playlist” so it can better identify who is engaging with significantly higher accuracy. With Voice Match, you can link up to six people to a single Google Assistant-powered device, so you each get tailored results when using the device.
Adjust how your devices activate
Different factors, like how noisy an environment is, may affect the Assistant’s responsiveness to the hotword or cause it to accidentally activate when it hears something similar to “Hey Google.” To better tailor Google Assistant to your environment and desired responsiveness, we’re rolling out a new feature that allows you to adjust how sensitive smart speakers and Smart Displays are to the hotword. You can make Google Assistant more sensitive if you want it to respond more often, or less sensitive to reduce unintentional activations.
In the coming weeks, you’ll start seeing the option to adjust how sensitive Google Assistant is in your settings through the Google Home app. These settings can be changed at any time and you can fine tune your preferences for each device if, for example, one is in a busy area like the kitchen while the other is on the bedroom nightstand. This feature will be supported in English with more languages to follow.