The Google Now voice assistant on Android phones may work offline soon. A team of engineers from Google recently published a paper, demonstrating
If speech recognition is available for offline use, it would enable companies to make the feature faster on smartphones, since the voice data will not have to be sent back to Google’s servers. In addition, it may also be more power efficient and should enable new features for smartphones. That said, being offline, it would presumably mean that the various Search-based enquiries will not be available. You can read the entire paper published by the engineers, here.
Google has been making big progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning recently. DeepMind Technologies, a UK-based Google-owned company, recently demonstrated the power of its AlphaGo AI, by beating world champion Lee Seedol in one-on-one competition.