Google Assistant set to launch its first-ever celebrity voice cameo in voice of John Legend

Call it the best tactic at making more people use the AI-powered digital assistant, Google Assistant is launching in its first-ever celebrity voice cameo today, in none other than the voice of John Legend. As The Verge reports, the legendary artist will answer your weather queries, play music, even sing "Happy Birthday" to you, albeit for a limited time.

John Legend is one of the six new voices to lend their voice to Google's smart digital assistant which is at the core of multiple IoT gadgets. Using Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence, WaveNet works by sampling human speech and directly modelling audio waveforms from it to create realistic-sounding voices. To activate the Grammy-winning artist's voice, simply say, "Hey, Google, talk like a Legend", or manually head to the Settings to switch to his voice. The feature is currently available in English in the US.