If you've used any of Google's voice services for Assistant, Maps, and Search, you will have gotten a lengthy notice about some major changes as to how and why it collects audio of what you say. These actions are a response to last year's revelations about how humans were contracted to review those clips and how some of them got leaked. The top-line takeaway here is that every user has been opted out of data collection.
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The Google Assistant is incredibly powerful once you start diving deeper into all of the custom voice commands and routines you can build for it. Unfortunately, these options live in the Assistant settings, which is rather hidden and hard to access — you need to invoke the Assistant, swipe up, wait for your profile picture to show up in the top right corner, and tap it to head there. Google seems to recognize this and has highlighted a neat voice command that gets you there instantly: "OK Google, open Assistant settings."
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Remember when you first used Assistant and had to repeat "Ok Google" and "Hey Google" a couple of times to train it to recognize your voice? Well, there's a way to delete these recordings entirely from Google's database, in case you've decided to part ways with the search company.
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Google Assistant knows a surprising number of things. Ask it for the distance between the earth and the moon or who won the last Superbowl, and it will give you the correct answer right away. But like any virtual assistant, there are times when it just doesn't get it. It either takes things too literally or comes up with a completely unexpected answer. We've collected a few of these instances over the past months and thought we'd brighten up your weekend with them.
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Our phones being able to respond to voice commands is great: you can ask for a unit conversion in the kitchen without getting flour on your screen, or change your driving destination without taking your eyes off the road. What's less great is that to facilitate that convenience, phones have to be listening at all times, and stopping them from doing so is frustratingly convoluted. There are settings in multiple places that all seem like they should do the same thing, but don't. This guide will explain the menus you'll need to navigate to change these settings, the differences between all the similar-sounding options, and the drawbacks of each Ok Google-disabling method.
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Judging by the Google Assistant help forums, Twitter, and Reddit, a whole lot of people are having trouble getting their phones to respond to voice commands. Twelve of the 20 top posts are complaining about the problem on several different device models and even in several languages. Google says it's on the case, though.
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The whale known as the Nexus 6 hasn't been in the news for some time, but a pretty annoying bug has been plaguing owners for almost two months now. "Ok Google" voice detection basically isn't working, showing the Voice Match setup page whenever the launch phrase is said.
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Google's speech recognition technology is insanely good - perhaps the best in the industry. But did you know Google stores all your voice searches? Every time you say "Ok Google" or "Hey Google," a snippet of audio containing the command is sent to the company's servers, where it is deciphered. These audio snippets are stored indefinitely (to improve accuracy), unless you delete them and opt out of future collection.
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Google Voice Search is dead. Cue in somber music.
For many years before Google Assistant was a thing, Android had a microphone you could trigger to perform actions. It had actions such as calls, texts, emails, music back in 2010, more than 10 languages supported way back in 2012, introduced nicknames and relationships such as "mom" and "husband" in 2014, and had multilingual support also in 2014. But then Assistant was introduced and Google started slowly transitioning things over from Voice Search.
Read MoreFor years, the Google Search app for Android has listened for the voice command "Ok Google." This carried over to Google Assistant, but it hasn't become any less awkward to say. When the Google Home was first introduced, it could listen for "Hey Google" in addition to the old phrase.
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