Bilingual Google Home responds in language you use
Voice-activated feature recognizes six languages
Hey, Google will be speaking your language more like you do if you're a bilingual home.
The voice-activated Google Assistant inside Google Home smart speakers, Android smartphones and iPhones, too, will be able to recognize queries made in any pairing of English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, with more languages to follow, and, assuming it works as promised, it will respond to requests in the language used for the question.
The new feature, which Google claims as a first of its kind, began rolling out Thursday. .
As Google explains, if you’re listening for an answer in English, you can ask something along the lines of, “Hey Google, what’s the weather like today?” If you want to hear music from a favorite German hip-hop band, you might ask “Hey Google, spiele die Fantastischen Vier.”
You will have to set up the pair of supported languages you want spoken in advance. (To do that, go to Assistant Settings, choose Preferences, then Assistant languages, and select the two languages you want to pair up.) After the initial setup, however, you won’t have to go into language settings each time you voice a query, unless you want to change your language pair. Prior to the introduction of this new feature, you’d have to go to settings every time you wanted the Assistant to recognize and respond in a single given language.
The multilingual challenge
Multilingual support has been a highly requested feature, Google says, and something the company has been working on for years. Advances in speech recognition, artificial intelligence and neural networks are now making it possible.
A bit of background: People can recognize when someone is speaking another language, even if they do not speak the language themselves, just by paying attention to the acoustics of the speech (intonation, phonetics, etc.). Coming up with a similar language-recognition framework for computers hasn’t been easy. Consider that for a computer to understand more than one language at a time, multiple processes need to run in parallel, each producing incremental results, Google says, allowing the Assistant not only to identify the language in which the query is spoken but also to parse the query into action.
Google provided this example in a company blog: “Even for a monolingual environment, if a user asks to 'set an alarm for 6pm', the Google Assistant must understand that "set an alarm" implies opening the clock app, fulfilling the explicit parameter of “6pm” and additionally make the inference that the alarm should be set for today. Making this work for a pair of languages only adds to the complexity.
For now, you are limited to the bilingual pairings listed above, though Google also hopes to extend the feature for trilingual families.
(By way of reference, the Google Assistant speaks about 20 individual languages these days on phones.)
In the meantime, there is a potential workaround for people who have Google Home speakers in a shared environment where several languages are spoken. Each user in the house can set up his or her own account on the speaker and then choose any unique pairing of the six supported languages.
The multilingual feature works on all Google Assistant-capable devices that support the compatible languages. Since the latest Google Smart Display speakers with a screen supports only English for the moment, that rules them out for now.