Google Assistant: How to change the voice of the language assistant

I don’t know about you, but for me, Google’s voice assistant is one of the most used features of my phone. I’ve connected all my lights to it and it’s now a hassle for me to get out of bed (or even open an app) to turn them off. But that’s not all I use the Google Assistant for: making calls, reading the messages, setting reminders for work, and timers for a perfect pasta — the Google Assistant is slowly becoming the closest thing to a soulmate.

And of course you don’t want that “soul mate” to mispronounce your foreign name! After all these years of machine learning, how come this robot still isn’t able to pronounce my (exotic) but very short name?! So we should change that.

This is how you change the voice of your Google Assistant

First of all we have to change the voice of our Google Assistant. The female, robotic voice is certainly iconic, but there’s so much variety out there! There are voices with different accents, and you can even make the Google Assistant sound – almost – like Jarvis Johnson! With a little trial and error I was able to discover 10 different voices that cover most tastes. You can even use celebrity voices.

Cold shower for everyone who uses the Google Assistant in German: There are currently only two different voices here.

The shortest way to change Google Assistant’s voice is to ask it:

1. Call your Google Assistant with the voice command: “Hey Google!” on.
2. Says “change your voice“
3. The assistant then changes to a button: “Manage language settings“.
4. Tapping this button will take you to the “Voice output of the Assistant.”
5. Then you can go through them available language presets scroll.
6. To select a voice, simply stop scrolling over the desired voice.

If you want to call up this menu manually:

1. Open yours Google app.
2. Tap yours profile icon top right.
3. Navigated through the Settings > Google Assistant.
4. Scroll down to section “All settings“.
5. Taps “Assistant Voice & Sounds”.

But as I said: the voices are not available in all languages ​​and regions. Initially I could only choose between two voices, Red and Orange (the fundamentally female and male sounding voices). In some other regions/languages ​​only the red voice was available.

In order to use the full variety of voices, I had to open the language English (United States) switch

1. Open yours Google app.
2. Tap yours profile icon top right.
3. Navigate to the Settings > Google Assistant > Languages.

How to get Google to pronounce your name correctly

Now that your Google Assistant sounds like the ideal digital soulmate, it’s time to teach it how to pronounce your name correctly. To make this change, we need to call the function called “nickname” use.

The fastest way to do this is to ask the Google Assistant to take you to the appropriate menu.

1. Call your Google Assistant again with the voice command: “Hey Google!” on.
2. Then says “Change my nickname“.
3. Now you can try to speak your desired nickname.
4. If you are not happy with the result, tap the prompt “Go to name settings“.
5. Tap on the option “Spell” and try different letter combinations until you get your name according to your wishes..

For my Greek name “Ζώης” the English translation is Zois, but Google distorts the pronunciation. After playing around with the letters a bit, I was able to get Google to pronounce them correctly by typing “Zoeis”. It might take some creativity and time, but in the end you can get an almost lifelike experience.

If you’re in the mood for some fun, you can get Google to call you by any name you can think of. There are no limits to your imagination.

Do you use the Google Assistant every day? Of all the voices I tried, my favorite was “Pink”! Wich do you like best? Tell me in the comments!