A lot of people with Google Home are wondering if they can change the wake word they use to get it to start listening. The current wake word is “Ok Google” and when you say this word it lights up on the top indicating that it is listening.
However, it is not possible to change this phrase to something other than “Ok Google” with the Google Home. Some people want to change the name of the device or have their own custom phrase, but this is not available with the Google Home at the moment.
The best you can do it switch to Hey Google from the accessibility settings. Big difference, we know!
TL;DR
- The Google Home currently only supports the “Ok Google” and “Hey Googe” wake word and cannot be changed.
- The Amazon Echo supports a few more wake words than the Google Home.
- The device is always listening, but only sends data to the cloud once it hears the wake word.
- The device does not have the computing power to recognize any word and must be trained to recognize the wake word in advance by Google.
Why Can’t I Change Okay Google?
In contrast to the Amazon Echo, which provides a couple more words that can be used to wake it up, most of these speakers are using only the stock built-in wake words.
This is because it is listening to what you are saying all the time, but it is only streaming audio to the cloud to be processed by Google or Amazon or whoever else is providing the device once it realizes that you are addressing it.
You don’t want it to be sending all the conversation in your room to Amazon or Google or whoever all the time, so it is not actually sending anything until it hears the wake word.
Not Enough Power
The reason for this is that there is a lot of advanced voice recognition and processing happening on the cloud with the audio that it does send. This allows you to get really complicated questions answered.
However, the first piece of voice recognition – recognizing the wake word to start sending information to the cloud – has to be done on the device itself, and these devices are not very powerful in terms of computing power.
This means that they can’t really have the device respond to any word because it would require training the device to recognize your voice and doing all of the calculations on the device itself instead of on the cloud.
At the moment, you are stuck with the “Ok Google” or “Hey Googe” wake word and most other voice-activated speakers have a similar limitation.
FAQ
Unfortunately, it is not possible to change the wake word for the Google Home at the moment. The only wake word that can be used is “Ok Google” or “Hey Google”.
This is due to the fact that the Google Home does not have enough computing power to recognize any arbitrary word to wake it up. It is only able to recognize a set of pre-defined words in order to start streaming audio to the cloud to be processed.