Google Is Bringing The Power Of BERT NLP To Assistant Conversations

Google is bringing a bunch of improvements to Google Assistant, here is a quick summary about a few of them:

• Teach Google to recognize unique names: Starting over the next few days, you can teach Google Assistant to enunciate and recognize names of your contacts the way you pronounce them. The feature will be available in English for now.
• Google will bring in BERT to improve Assistant’s conversation skills for alarms and timer tasks These updates are now available for alarms and timers on Google smart speakers in English in the U.S. and expanding to phones and smart displays soon.
• More natural conversations using BERT: They applied BERT to further improve the quality of your conversations. Google Assistant uses your previous interactions and understands what’s currently being displayed on your smartphone or smart display to respond to any follow-up questions, letting you have a more natural, back-and-forth conversation. If you’re having a conversation with your Assistant about Miami and you want more information, it will know that when you say “show me the nicest beaches” you mean beaches in Miami. Assistant can also understand questions that are referring to what you’re looking at on your smartphone or tablet screen eg: pictures of buildings and then ask [who built the first one] or queries that look incomplete like [when] or [from its construction].