At CES 2020 earlier this month, Google announced a number of changes that will be rolled out to its voice assistant in the coming months, and the first traces of one of those features have now reportedly shown up in the latest beta build of the Google app on Android. That’s according to 9to5Google, which says than an APK teardown of Google app beta v10.93 has revealed multiple sensitivity settings for the ‘Hey Google’ hotword.
As per the report, code found within the APK shows that it will soon allow users to increase or decrease the sensitivity for the Assistant keyword on Android devices. One of the relevant strings reveal that the new settings will enable users to “raise or lower this device’s sensitivity to make it more or less responsive to the ‘Hey Google’ trigger”. The report also found clues that there might be at least three settings, including ‘Least Sensitive’, ‘Default’ and ‘Most Sensitive’.
Another interesting thing to note here is that users might be able to make changes to each device individually, enabling them to set different sensitivity options for different speakers. Do note that as things stand now, Google is planning to allow only primary account holders to make changes to the sensitivity levels.
As is the case with features discovered by APK teardowns, the sensitivity options are yet to go live, but it’s expected to happen in the near future. Unfortunately, though, the blog also claims that it may not be available on all devices or in all languages from day 1, although, that should happen at some stage. There’s no word on when this feature will be eventually rolled out, but given that it has already started showing up in the beta builds, it probably shouldn’t be too long before we get to see it in action.
