How to Change Google Home's Name (Wake Word) and Voice - Everything You Need to Know

Machines and virtual assistants are gradually taking over our homes and there is little we can do to stop them. In fact, if you have had a taste of the Google smart home experience, you might be constantly looking for ways to extend your Google Assistant’s functionality.

But for such a helpful assistant, you may feel like having to refer to her in a cold and impersonal way sucks. If that is the case, is there anything you can do about it? If so, how can you shake things up? Well, hang around as we explore everything there is to know about Google Home’s name.

By default, Google Assistant responds to two wake words, these are “OK Google” and “Hey Google.” However, the AI assistant can also respond to a little-known but highly delightful wake word, Hey Boo Boo.

Originally, Google Assistant on phones could only respond to “OK Google.” But an update in December 2017 made it possible for phone users too to use “Hey Google” in addition to the other phrase. At this point, these are the only two words you can use to wake your Google Assistant.

There are a number of reasons why Google could have chosen these wake words other than the obvious one – reinforcing their brand. First, their choice is gender-neutral unlike the names of other virtual assistants (Siri, Alexa and Cortana). Women have always been associated with assistant and clerical roles and the idea of a gendered assistant reinforces that idea.

A second reason could have to do with the fact that these wake words do not interfere with real-life identities. The names of Google Assistant competitors are real-life names and you might have someone in your household going by those names. And this causes pretty interesting situations. But Hey Google and OK Google would never cause confusion.

An even more important reason could be that using two words instead of one is more difficult to spoof. For systems that use a single wake word, the chances of false positives are much higher than when it is a phrase. As such, there have been instances of virtual assistants listening to and recording conversations that were not meant for them. Google Home is highly unlikely to wake up at random sounds thanks to the wake word (phrase) choice.

In spite of all the above benefits, you might still have compelling reasons to want to change Google Assistant’s wake word. For instance, if for whatever reason you have a pet named Google, then there might be a little confusion between the animal and the AI assistant. It could also be that the toddler in your house finds it hard to say Google.

At times too, Google Home fails to recognize or respond to the wake word, especially when used by a non-native English speaker. In both of these cases, you might wish for a simpler option to give everyone access to the assistant.

Getting the opportunity to customize Google Assistant’s name would also greatly enhance user experience. You might agree that “Hey Google” and “OK Google” do not exactly roll off the tongue with ease. Plus it lacks the personification aspect and might to some users make the whole experience seem unnatural, like talking to a computer.

More importantly, you might have multiple Google Home devices in your smart home. In cases where such devices are in close proximity, renaming one might help avert confusion. For example, if there are two smart speakers in adjacent rooms, you could have a hard time identifying the one you want to talk to. Referring to them by different names makes things clear.

Unfortunately, for Google Home users, there is no official way to change your Google Assistant’s wake word yet. This means that you have to work with the two official phrases. Alternatively, you could go for “OK Boo Boo” to keep things fun and get your toddler in on the action.

On a brighter note, a Google app teardown revealed that in the future, a new feature might change this situation for the better if it ever gets implemented. An analysis by 9to5google revealed that an update might allow users to give their Google Assistant custom wake words. It is noteworthy though that they conducted this analysis by decompiling an application that Google uploaded to the Play Store.

The files are known as APKs and they contain lines of code hinting at possible future features. However, Google may or may not implement these updates and the interpretation might not be perfect.

With that in mind, the analysis completed a teardown of Google app 7.20 APK and discovered a new option known as “Teach your Assistant to recognize.” This feature would allow users to instruct the virtual assistant to respond to your wake word of choice. The code also revealed that Google Assistant would offer wake word suggestions at the onset. However, even with the new wake words enabled, the Assistant would still be able to respond to the two original options.

Listening to your AI assistant respond in the same old voice every single day can get pretty boring. Considering that Google Assistant personalizes most things to suit your preferences, it would be great if yours could sound different from all others, right? Unfortunately, getting a completely personalized experience is still a little far-fetched.

On the bright side, you can change Google Assistant’s voice and accent to match your preference and make your experience a little more fun. At the start, Google Assistant had only one voice and then expanded to two voices. But last year, the list grew to include six more voices as announced at Google I/O 2018. Recently, they expanded even further with two more.

With the comprehensive list of options currently available, you can shift between voices every day of your life to keep things interesting. The process was rather complicated in the past as the app had separate interfaces for Google Home and Google Assistant on phone. But now, a change of voice from your Google Home speaker will reflect on the phones connected to your Google account.

To make things even more fun, Google has provided a color-coded interface to let you access this function. The range of colours representing different voices currently includes:

How to get a celebrity’s voice to talk to you on Google Home devices

When choosing a voice for your Google Assistant, besides the many color-coded options, you can choose the grey color as well. This one stands for the “Cameo” voice and it allows you to use a celebrity voice that’s currently available.

Although Google Assistant used to be able to melt your heart by responding in the silky-smooth voice of John Legend, this option lasted for only a year. Released in April 2019, John Legend’s voice was removed from Google Assistant celebrity voices in late March 2020.

At present, the current celebrity voice for Google Assistant comes from the American actress Issa Rae and is only available in the US for a limited time. To use Isa’s voice, try saying this: “Hey Google, talk like Issa” and it will immediately make the switch.

Like with John Legend as your assistant’s voice, Google has a list of voice commands that it specifically created for Rae:

• What do you think of me?
• Sing a song
• How do I look?
• Do I need an umbrella today?
• Are you single?
• Compliment me
• What do you think of John Legend?

There is no limit to the number of times you can change your Assistant’s voice, language or accent. And whenever you get bored, you can always revert to default settings. Keep in mind though that these changes can limit the Assistant’s ability to understand you. Hence, if you change to a British accent, be sure to give commands using the same (British) accent. Otherwise, there could be a communication breakdown.

As we said at the onset, there is no official way to change Google Home’s wake word. But it is possible to use a clever hack that lets you call your Assistant by any name you fancy. A new concept known as Project Alias has created a teachable parasite to make this reality.

It uses a middle-man device that you place on the Google Home device you want to rename. This device constantly produces white noise to interfere with the Assistant’s listening capability. You need to train Alias to recognize your preferred wake word. When you say this word, it will play a recording of “OK Google” or “Hey Google” to wake your device up and allow you access to Assistant’s voice control features.

Besides allowing you to customize your Google Home wake word, it also enhances privacy in your smart home. Since it is always producing static, it reduces the possibility of having your smart speakers record confidential conversations as they are less likely to wake up mistakenly.

However, building the device involves a rather lengthy procedure, which might be a bit cumbersome for non-technical Google Home users. Hopefully, Google will at soon implement an update to facilitate wake word customization.