Google Assistant's Speed Is Faster Than Tapping Your Phone

Google Assistant can maintain a decent speed, but it was nowhere near how quickly a real human reacts. It is largely because it has to have access to the cloud all the time so that servers can process around 100 GB of models of AI to come up with responses and then give you the answers.

So if some of the steps can be cut short, like decreasing the data to just 0.5GB and load the system from your own devices, the responding time will be much faster, like ten times faster. With this new speed, tapping your phone to look for what you need seems to be too slow to believe.

That is precisely what Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO announced at the company’s I/O. By turning Assistant into a package small enough to squeeze into your devices, it can respond to your questions and commands almost immediately.

In the demo session, the demonstrator made a wide range of commands including replying to emails, turning the flashlight on, visit another app, or write a message and the assistant could respond instantly without any delay. All she had to do was to say “Hey Google.” Google Assistant could decipher commands in the context of the apps were in use.

What startled the audience the most is how easy it was to write an email. Other systems cannot recognize when you want to compose an email and when to do a task, but Google’s Assistant is able to do that. It can tell the difference when she “said send” it and “set subject.”

Voice assistants are handy with simple tasks like turn the light on or off, but for more complex commands, users still have to open their phone and do them manually. With the new improvements from Google, we are now on the right track toward a future when all we have to do is to ask, and the assistant will do the rest for us.

Here is the video of the demo, if you just want to see how fast the assistant is, just skip to 30:40.

This feature will be on Pixel phones later this year.