In the past few years since it launched, Google has been very insistent on proving that the Google Assistant isn't just a cute gimmick, but a fully fledged product. Just last week, along with the Pixel 2 siblings (and a whole bunch of other stuff), the company announced two new dedicated smart speakers, which are joining the already huge family of Assistant-enabled devices which includes last year's Google Home, as well as pretty much any Android device running Marshmallow and above. But expansion without improvement would be next to worthless — especially considering the Assistant (and, let's be honest, all AI assistants in general) could certainly use some more tuning up. And today Google has announced just that: a major improvement to the Assistant's voice synthesis capabilities, which is pretty much the key interface between it and a user. The improvements are a result of Alphabet's 2014 acquisition of British AI firm DeepMind, which has since developed an ...