Source: CHRIS DELMAS / Getty

Your Google Assistant now can talk and even sing like a Legend with the launch of its celebrity voice cameo feature. To kick things off, singer/activist John Legend lends his smooth.

Launched on Wednesday (April 3), users of Google Assistant will be able to have for a limited time the Grammy Award-winner sing “Happy Birthday,” answer questions, tell you the weather and even inform you about his wife, Chrissy Teigen.

John Legend’s voice will be one of six celebrity cameo voices coming to Android, iOS devices and anywhere Google Assistant is available. The technology is all possible through Google’s speech synthesis model WaveNet powered by the tech giants DeepMind artificial intelligence. First introduced at Google’s I/O 2018 event, WaveNet allows for more realistic-sounding voices by sampling human speech and creating audio waveforms from it. Speaking on the new tech, Google CEO Sundar Pichai boasts it provides for “shorter studio time” and being able to “actually capture the richness” of the model’s voice.

Users can boot up John Legend’s voice by saying “Hey Google, talk like a Legend” or by simply going to the Assistant voice in their settings and, switching to his voice. Once activated you can get responses from singer using prompts like “Hey, Google, are we just ordinary people?” or “Hey, Google, serenade me” plus many other Easter Eggs you will find through experimentation.

The voice feature is only available in the United States, but we won’t be shocked if it goes global as it gains in popularity and more voices get added. So go ahead and give it a try and check out the video below of John Legend lending his golden voice to Google below.

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Photo: CHRIS DELMAS / Getty

Source: HipHopWired.com

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