A busy dashboard can leave an older Android device sending speech to Assist long after it was recorded. The Companion app moves that audio work away from the screen’s main thread and sends queued audio together, preventing a slow interface from steadily pushing the conversation behind.
Timothy tested the change on a OnePlus 3 while its dashboard was busy. The observed start of voice activity fell from about 1.7 seconds to 0.6 seconds, and an audio backlog that previously grew to around 800 milliseconds no longer accumulated. Those figures describe that test, rather than a promised speedup for every phone.
The app also discards remaining audio when speech recognition finishes, so a completed request does not continue sending old sound.