Bilingual Smart Assistant

Google Assistant goes bilingual; lets users speak two languages interchangeably.

21:07 03 September 2018

Google Assistant is the first smart assistant to become bilingual. Users can now speak two languages interchangeably and the device will respond in kind.

 

Currently, the Assistant can understand any pair of languages with English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, with more languages to be added in the coming months.

 

Earlier this year, Google has announced that it was going to offer support for up to 30 languages by the end of 2018. In February, it confirmed a feature by which Google Assistant would automatically detect which language is being used and respond in kind.

 

Although bilingualism is already a huge win for many countries where people have at least two major languages, many predict that this move will soon lead to multilingualism. 

 

Previously, Google Assistant was capable of understanding different languages but users had to physically designate a primary and a secondary language in the app’s settings.

 

Google hopes that it will be able to provide language support services to up to 95per cent of Android smartphones worldwide that are capable of running Google Assistant in the near future.