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How to change the Google Assistant voice on Home speakers and Android

John Legend is yet to grace us with his presence

Tired of your Google Assistant’s robotic droning? Don’t like the other option? Well good news then: this year Google rolled out six new voices to choose from. For all you maths fans, that brings the grand total up to eight.

Google deployed the update just hours after announcing the new voices back at I/O 2018, where it also revealed that John Legend will be lending his pipes to Assistant. Sadly, you won’t be able to get John’s dulcet tones on your Google Home until later in the year, at which point we assume he’ll be living in every household.

The new voices are also a proof of concept for WaveNet, an AI voice tool built by Google subsidiary DeepMind to easily take human voices and synthesise them into your Assistant.

If you want to change the Assistant voice, it’s relatively easy to do so, but the process is a little different depending on whether you want to do so on a Google Home device or an Android phone. Below, we walk you through both.

How to change Assistant's voice on Home

1. Open up the Google Home app on your smartphone (either Android or iOS) and then tap the menu icon on the left-hand side

2. Go to Settings, More settings

3. Tap the Assistant tab, then hit Assistant Voice.

3. You should now see a row of eight voices to choose from. Each voice is tied to a colour, and you can swipe through them and choose whichever works is best for you.

The order of the voices is randomised for each user, so don't worry about Google subtly pushing its preference on you. Just make your choice and live your best life.

However, this is an updated way of selecting your Google Assistant voice and it's still rolling out across the US. If it hasn't yet rolled out to you – or if you're not in the US – you'll instead get a list of voices that's much less visually appealing.