With the voice commands and voice assistants taking up a major role in the technology race, the Google’s assistant is adapting the ability to speak with you in two languages without having to switch accounts.
With this new modification, Google Home and Android smartphone owners will be able to speak in any two of the following languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese. The Google Assistant will then reply in the language of the query it’s answering. Compared to us mortals that have to undergo processes such as Effortless English accent training in order to learn new languages, Google’s voice assistants just know languages automatically.
It was in February that the company stated that it is working on this feature, but since then there were no updates about it for a few months. The new feature of Google Assistant will be quite helpful for bilingual households, which make up an increasing percentage of American families.
According to the reports, roughly 20 percent of Americans speak a language other than English in their households. So, this new feature of Google assistant will play a major role there.
“We hope multilingual will encourage more use of the Assistant in bilingual homes, thus helping us continue to improve our training models,” Google stated.
Talking about the languages, Spanish is the most common non-English language spoken in US households, followed by Chinese languages – which are included in the languages supported by Google’s new feature. The company said it is working to expand the number of languages it supports in this new bilingual mode.
But, currently, Google’s Home speakers are far behind Amazon’s Echo speakers – with roughly 27 percent of the market as compared to Amazon’s 41 percent. But competition is still fierce internationally, and Google must be prepared to compete with firms such as Samsung or Xiaomi.
The new feature can be turned on through the Google Assistant or Google Home settings.