The infusion of federated learning on Gboard helped Google to adopt popular terms at the moment, collecting anonymous data and returning a delta of new information. The company is now bringing federated learning to Google Assistant on phones to help you better detect when you say (or when you’re not saying) “Ok Google”.
Looking at the settings in the Google Assistant app, some users are finding a new Help to improve the wizard menu. There is a button on it that allows Google to collect the user’s audio recordings in order to improve the overall service of the Assistant.
A dip in the Google Assistant help pages brings more specificity to what the company is collecting:
When Google Assistant is turned on or nearly turned on, federated learning temporarily stores small snippets of your voice recordings on the device. With federated learning, we use these recordings to learn how to adjust the trigger logic for the Google Assistant.
The specific model in force now aims to deal with the rates of false positives and false negatives when choosing the “Hey Google” hotphrase.
To clarify, Google’s servers receive your audio when “Ok Google” activates your smart device. Depending on how you configured your Web and App Activity settings, this audio can go online for up to 18 months.
When you activate the button, federated learning saves audio recordings of successful “Ok Google” recordings, as well as phrases that do not activate the device locally only on your device for up to 63 days. It also records data about your device, how and when you use it, and whether interactions with the Assistant were satisfactory or not. Google obtains recordings and all data from entire blocks of users at once – designed to keep these recordings relatively private – but does not save them on its servers after adjusting its training model. Users can disable the Wizard to improve Help, which will delete recordings and data from the device.
If you are curious about other details, check out the help article here. The availability of resources seems to be scarce at the moment – 9to5Google thinks it reaches the maximum of one device per account of Google.
