Gboard gets faster, support for voice dictation on Pixel phones



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Gboard is the leading keyboard solution for many Android devices. Many features rely on artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural networks. One of these features is a.k.a speech-to-text voice dictation. When you talk on your device, it sends your voice safely to the cloud where it is processed, converted to text, and returned to your device, displayed on the screen. This is the traditional way of processing voice data for a very long time, but Google is changing that.

In order to support more privacy-friendly and enhanced security methods, Google introduces offline and device-based processing on Pixel phones. This method has many advantages. First, it does not require an internet connection. The previous method required WiFi or mobile data to send and retrieve information to and from the cloud. Not relying on an internet connection for your keyboard application is definitely an improvement. Second, the offline processing method reduces latency and unreliability issues.

Google explains this by giving us an overview of how speech recognition software was searching for the right data in the cloud. The "search graph," consisting of language, audio, and pronunciation models, was apparently 2 GB in size. This is not very convenient for search speeds, and as it will now be hosted on our devices, not very convenient for storage, too. Thanks to sophisticated compression and decoding technologies, Google has managed to reduce the size to 450 MB first, then 80 MB last.

We already knew that this feature was coming to Gboard as we had seen it for the first time in October 2018. What we did not know was that this feature only applies to Google Pixel devices. I have the impression that sooner or later, this feature will be deployed on all Android devices, as do many features exclusive to Google. You can enable the feature from the Gboard settings in the "Voice Recording" category. If you do not see it, we suggest you update Gboard with the latest version. The list of the Play Store app is below.

Gboard - the Google keyboard
Gboard - the Google keyboard

Source: Google AI blog

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