Google LLC is improving its digital assistant’s capabilities, adding a new feature that’s meant to enable more fluid and open-ended conversations.

Continued Conversation for Google Assistant, announced at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, is designed to make follow-up questions feel more realistic, company officials said.

“For the Google Assistant to have a natural conversation, it should be able to understand when it’s being spoken to and should be capable of responding to several requests during an interaction,” Google wrote in a blog post.

The feature comes as a response to complaints from some Google Assistant users that it doesn’t feel natural to have to keep saying “Hey Google” before asking a new question each time, as has always been the case. With Continued Conversation, the Google Assistant will now remain at the ready, so to speak, in order to answer followup questions without users needing to say the activation phrase first.

So for example, if a user asks Google Assistant about today’s weather and she’s informed that it will be raining that afternoon, she can then say something such as, “Remind me to buy a rain jacket this morning” without needing to say “Hey Google” first. The digital assistant will then respond appropriately.

Google said the assistant will stay active once a question or command has been responded to for up to eight seconds in order to listen for followup questions. After eight seconds, if no more human speech is detected, it will shut down. If it does hear human speech, it will wait until the speaker has finished before determining if it needs to respond.

Google said Continued Conversation is rolling out starting today on its Google Home, Google Home Mini and Google Home Max devices. The feature does need to be enabled first, however, which can be done by navigating to Settings → Preferences → Continued Conversation and hitting the toggle button.

Image: Google