WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

Just over a year ago we presented WaveNet, a new deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms that is capable of producing better and more realistic-sounding speech than existing techniques. At that time, the model was a research prototype and was too computationally intensive to work in consumer products. But over the last 12 months we have worked hard to significantly improve both the speed and quality of our model and today we are proud to announce that an updated version of WaveNet is being used to generate the Google Assistant voices for US English and Japanese across all platforms.Using the new WaveNet model results in a range of more natural sounding voices for the Assistant.