Google app updates outdated Speech Recognition page with new UI and a new feature AssembleDebug November 11, 2024

The Google app with each updates brings various kind of small and big changes. Sometimes it introduces new features and sometimes it's just UI changes. When it comes to UI changes, Google has adapted most of its apps with Material You designs and there are definitely some exceptions like Google Opinion, Google Analytics and some others. 

The Google app which comes pre-installed on almost every device still hasn't adapted material you colors, but Google is definitely trying to update it with modern design with just blue accent (just like Play Store). There are various pages inside Google app which has old UI from years ago. The one about which specificity talking here is - The Offline Speech Recognition page. Yes, I know, it's definitely not the most used thing in the app. But here is how it currently looks - 

Google is updating above section of Offline Speech Recognition with a better UI and which follows Material You Colors. If you use a Pixel or any other stock UI based Android device, you might have already seen similar UI before (inside On-Device speech recognition). Here is how it looks. 

However most of the functionality here remains the same.Google is adding a new "Extension" section in this page. The Extension name itself doesn't make much sense here but there are few strings which hints at some "Speech Enhancement" extensions. 

<string name="speech_enhancement_extension_category_title">Extension<string>
<string name="speech_enhancement_extension_category">speech_enhancement_extension<string>

This extension section as you can see in the screenshots is currently empty because Google is still working on it. According to PapersWithCode -"Speech Enhancement is a signal processing task that involves improving the quality of speech signals captured under noisy or degraded conditions. The goal of speech enhancement is to make speech signals clearer, more intelligible, and more pleasant to listen to, which can be used for various applications such as voice recognition, teleconferencing, and hearing aids." 

Speech enhancement definitely makes sense as Google app has to do a lot of voice input when we use Google assistant or Gemini to ask for things. It would better detect your queries in noisy environment.

Above changes are not live yet and were spotted in the beta version 15.44.27.28.arm64 of Google app.

Follow my telegram channel for such updates, you can also follow me on Threads, Mastodon and X (Twitter).