South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
¿Que pasa, Alexa? Amazon’s voice assistant goes bilingual
Alexa, do you speak Spanish?
¡Sí!
Beginning in early October, users of the Amazon Alexa voice assistant can enable it to speak Spanish on their home devices.
In addition to Spanish, Amazon also announced that customers will be able to switch between certain languages with Alexa with the ease as many South Floridians do on a daily basis in professional and social situations.
For example, if you ask Alexa about the weather in English, the device will respond in the same language. But if another user in the home asks in Spanish, the device will understand and reply en español. Amazon Music listeners will also be able to ask for their favorite songs, albums and about new Latin music playlists in Spanish, including Sin Filtro, Tierra Tropical and Puro Reggaeton.
The Spanish roll out is part of a new multilingual mode which will be available in three pairs: English and Spanish in the U.S., Indian English and Hindi in India and Canadian English and French in Canada.
“With billions of people in the world speaking more than one language, many homes are not homogenous when it comes to languages anymore,” the company recently stated in its news blog, noting that the languages are part of the company’s neural text to speech technology.
Alexa’s bilingual feature is similar to one by Google. Last year, Google Assistant, the voice-based virtual assistant, introduced a multilingual mode that allows customers “to jump between two different languages, across queries without having to go back to their language settings,” according to the company.
Once users pick two of the languages from English, Spanish, French, German, Italian to Japanese, they can talk to the Assistant in either language and the program will respond accordingly.
To enable Spanish on Alexa, users will have to visit “Settings” on the app and then choose the device they want to change the language on. Then they have to pick language and set it to “Español (Estados Unidos).” On Echo devices with a screen, customers can also swipe down from the top of the screen and select “Settings” and then “Device Options” followed by “Device Language” and setting it to “Español (Estados Unidos).”
The language news comes as Seattle-based Amazon named actor and producer Samuel L. Jackson as its first celebrity voice for Alexa. Later this year, users will be able to interact with the Jacksonvoiced Alexa and ask about the weather, set alarms, request music and jokes based on the entertainer’s personality. There will be an explicit and non-explicit version, both costing 99 cents.