Technology
John Legend’s voice comes to Google Assistant on April 3
Listen, we all know that John Legend is Chrissy Teigen’s one and only, that is something we ACCEPT and CELEBRATE. But starting Wednesday, everyone with a Google Assistant-enabled device will be able to bring the R&B singer/celebrity husband into their homes.
At Google’s I/O developer conference in May 2018, it promised that John Legend would be one of several new Google Assistant voices in a limited capacity. Now, that’s actually happening, as Google is unveiling the voice of John Legend as a “cameo.” That means that Google Assistant will answer some general queries and other specific and playful questions in the voice of Legend himself, if a user chooses to enable the feature (duh literally who would not do this if given the choice).
You can enable the John Legend cameo by saying “Hey Google, talk like a legend.” Or, you can change the Assistant Voice in Assistant settings if you prefer to use a screen.
Google had promised that the Legend collab would come by the end of 2018, but better late than never!
To make the cameo happen, John Legend spent some time in Google’s recording studio, and laid down some musical and non-musical answers to specific questions and requests. Google also employed the “speech synthesis model, ” which makes Legend Assistant able to answer some limited general questions that he didn’t necessarily specifically record.
For example, John Legend can tell you what the weather is like, what the temperature is, and whether you’ll need an umbrella.
John also has some answers to random questions, like “Why is the sky blue?” or “How do you cook bacon in the oven?” (We suspect Legend may have asked Cravings queen Chrissy Teigen for help on that one).
But Legend can do more than just provide helpful advice. Google has added some John Legend “easter eggs” in the cameo. So if you say “Serenade Me” to Google Assistant, John Legend will sing you a signature tune. Mashable cannot guarantee that this is an event you will be able to emotionally survive.
We are fully aware that this “cameo” is not that functional and mostly a gimmicky ad for Google Assistant. But hot damn if we don’t want to watch John Legend record Google Assistant query answers all day long.
John and Chrissy have been in the (well paid) Google family for a while. They were part of Google’s Oscars advertising campaign, and John Legend is a Google Pixel spokesperson.
Teigen also had the perfect response to a tense Twitter feud between her husband and Kanye West, when she described the discussion about Trump, slavery, and the power of celebrity — posted on Twitter as screenshot exchanges of Kanye’s blue bubbles and Legend’s green bubbles — as “the most elaborate and complex google pixel phone ad I have ever seen.”
Here’s a list of the full list of Legend-enabled commands; everything beyond this will, unfortunately, be answered in regular robot assistant.
A good place to start? Google suggests asking “Hey Google, are we just ordinary people?”
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“Serenade me”
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“Sing me a song”
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“Are you John Legend?”
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“Do you know Chrissy Teigen?”
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“How are you?”
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“Sing Happy Birthday”
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“Tell me a joke”
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“Who’s your celebrity crush?”
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“What’s your favorite song?”
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“What’s your best pick up line?”
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“Compliment me”
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“What’s the weather?”
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“How far away is the moon?”
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“What are jazz hands”?
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“How do you cook bacon in the oven?”
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“Is there an atmosphere on the moon?”
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“Is Venus the same size as the Earth?”
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“Why is the sky blue?”
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“What’s the temperature outside?”
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“Do I need an umbrella today?”
Other smart assistants have borrowed the voices of celebrities. In 2018, Amazon conscripted Jimmy Fallon to tell bad dad jokes in lieu of Alexa. It’s one of the schticks these tech corporations are using to delight (and ultimately woo) customers in the all-out war for smart assistant domination.
No offense Amazon, but we’ll take John over Jimmy any day.
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