I have to admit I have become that guy who speaks to the Assistant constantly — turn on the lights, open the garage door, send a message to Chris, what time is it is Prague — you get the point. One annoying issue with this on mobile is that the Assistant reply volume is tied to the media volume, and it seems my Assistant is a loud talker.
By the looks of a new setting that has popped up on the Google Assistant Support page we may soon be able to mute spoken replies on Android devices. There’s not a lot of details around the new setting and it’s not live for us on any of our devices however based on the description in the support page it’s functionality seems simple.
“When you turn off Speech Output, your Google Assistant will show you responses on your phone, but it won’t say them out loud”
That’s pretty cut and dry to be honest, turn it on and Assistant will shut up and you’ll just get a written response on the screen. To see if you have the new option get to your Assistant settings (I find the easiest way is to long press on the home button, swipe up and then tap on your avatar, that loads the Google Assistant settings). From there if you have a setting labelled “Voice and speech” then you may have the new setting. Jump in to Voice and speech and toggle off Speech Output.
Overall this is a minor but very welcome option, should out below if you can see the new setting on any of your devices.
It would be better to give Google Assistant its own volume. That way you could tie volume to a time based profile. Hate it when it wakes the baby.
Quite a *quiet* mode 🙂
Quite what?