Last September, Google announced it would add an option to control the sensitivity of the Assistant’s hotword “Hey Google”. The feature was first spotted in January through an APK teardown and now, Google has officially confirmed to The Verge that the company has started rolling out the feature gradually.
The response comes after XDA’s Editor-in-Chief Mishaal Rahman manually enabled the feature yesterday. The feature will be available in Device Settings -> More of the Google Home app.
There will be three sensitivity options namely Least sensitive, Default, Most sensitive. As the name hints, you may choose the option that works the best for you. For instance, choose Most sensitive if you feel the Assistant is not often picking up the hotword or Least sensitive if you’re getting annoyed by accidental Google Assistant triggers.
The main advantage of this feature is that you’ll be to set Assistant sensitivity levels with respect to each device in your smart home ecosystem. Rahman has clarified the feature will support smart displays as well.
As the feature is slowly rolling out, it might take some time to show up on your device. Until then, you may use the command “Hey Google, that wasn’t for you” to delete whatever Assistant heard during accidental triggers.
Since this is a useful feature that would help a lot of people, we hope Google doesn’t restrict it to its first-party smart home devices. Once the feature gets a wider rollout, which should hopefully happen in the coming weeks, we could expect Google to detail the list of supported devices.
