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New ways we’re making speech recognition work for everyone

Voice-activated technologies, like Google Home or the Google Assistant, can help people do things like make a phone call to someone, adjust the lighting in their house, or play a favorite song — all with the sound of their voice. But these technologies may not work as well for the millions of people around the world who have non-standard speech. In 2019 we launched our research initiative Project Euphonia with the aim of finding ways to leverage AI to make speech recognition technology more accessible.

Today, we’re expanding this commitment to accessibility through our involvement in the Speech Accessibility Project, a collaboration between researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and five technology companies, including Google. The university is working with advocacy groups, like Team Gleason and the Davis Phinney Foundation, to create datasets of impaired speech that can help accelerate improvements to automated speech recognition (ASR) for the communities these organizations support.

Since the launch of Project Euphonia, we’ve had the opportunity to work with community organizations to compile a collection of speech samples from over 2,000 people. This collection of utterances has allowed Project Euphonia researchers to adapt standard speech recognition systems to understand non-standard speech more accurately, and ultimately reduce median word error rates by an average of more than 80%. These promising results created the foundation for Project Relate, an Android app that allows people to submit samples of their voice and receive a personalized speech recognition model that more accurately understands their speech. It also encouraged the expansion of Project Euphonia to include additional languages like French, Japanese, and Spanish.

There’s still a lot to be done to develop ASR systems that can understand everyone’s voice — regardless of speech pattern. However, it’s clear that larger, more diverse datasets and collaboration with the communities we want to reach will help get us to where we want to go. That is why we’re making it easy for Project Euphonia participants to share copies of their recordings to the Speech Accessibility Project. Our hope is that by making these datasets available to research and development teams, we can help improve communication systems for everyone, including people with disabilities.

4 Ottobre 2022
Support a clean energy future with Nest Renew
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Support a clean energy future with Nest Renew

Last year we launched an early preview of Nest Renew, a service for compatible Nest thermostats that makes it easy to support a clean energy future from home. We’re excited to announce that starting today, anyone in the continental U.S. with a compatible Nest thermostat can now join Nest Renew.

Support clean energy already on the grid

One of our primary goals during the development of Nest Renew was helping people make better use of clean energy that’s already on the grid. That’s the thinking behind powerful new features like Energy Shift, which helps you automatically prioritize your usage to times when your home’s electricity is cleaner or less expensive. Every five minutes, Energy Shift gathers local power grid emissions forecasts across the country. Then, using these forecasts, our algorithms look for opportunities where running a home’s heating or cooling slightly earlier or later would result in taking advantage of cleaner energy, and automatically adjust your thermostat accordingly. This is all done with very small changes from scheduled temperatures (generally less than one degree Fahrenheit). The changes are so subtle that you won’t notice and will stay just as comfortable, but of course, you are in control and can manually adjust your thermostat at any time.

And small actions through features like Energy Shift really do add up — we estimate that it’s already helped Nest Renew users in early preview collectively prioritize cleaner energy usage for over 20,000,000 hours.

Illustrative example of how Energy Shift precools or delays cooling of a home based on the CO2 emissions forecast

Start making an impact today

Anyone in the continental U.S. with a 3rd generation Nest Learning Thermostat, the Nest Thermostat E or the newest Nest Thermostat connected to a Google account can now join Nest Renew for free and start making better use of clean energy in their area with Energy Shift. If you want to extend your impact even further, you can upgrade to Nest Renew Premium for only $10 a month, which matches the fossil fuel electricity used in your home with enough clean energy to cover the average U.S. household with high-quality renewable energy credits generated from projects within Google’s own clean energy portfolio.

Users can also access features like impact reports and the Energy Impact Program, which lets you help direct Nest Renew funds to nonprofit partners working toward an equitable sustainable future, to see your efforts in action. Because when we each do a little, it adds up to a lot.

4 Ottobre 2022