The Google Assistant is now bilingual
By Thomas Devlin
Despite fears of privacy violations, virtual assistants are fast becoming a staple in people’s homes. Consequently, voice technology is now a very hot field — and an active frontier of tech innovation. Now, Google has taken the latest step forward by introducing a bilingual feature on its Google Assistant devices.
This isn’t the first time that virtual assistants have been able to speak other languages. Alexa and Google Home both have offered multiple languages, and Google has been leading the field with about 15 languages (and a promise of 30 by the end of the year): French, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, Marathi, Dutch, Indonesian and others are all available now.
What’s new is that Google Assistant can now understand two languages at the same time. Whereas before, you could only select one language at a time, you can now set your Google Home to understand two simultaneously. As of now, you can choose from six overall—English, Italian, French, Spanish, German and Japanese—and there are plans to add more in the future.
For now, Google is marketing the Google Assistant’s new capabilities to multilingual households. Instead of having to choose just one language for your virtual assistant to listen for, you can switch between them. It could also be useful for language learners who want another way to use their language in everyday life.
Ideally, virtual assistants will be able to understand and respond to any language, but this is much harder than it sounds. Google explained how the current system works in a blog post. Basically, Google Assistant takes the audio input (you talking) and transcribes it using models of both languages that have been designated by the user. So if you chose Spanish and English, it will try to transcribe what you’re saying in both Spanish and English.
As quickly as possible, the assistant decides which language is being spoken so it can cancel the “incorrect” transcription. If you try to do a combination of two languages — like Spanglish — it won’t work. The faster it can decide which language you’re speaking, the better. But the more languages it tries to understand, the longer this process will take, because it will have more language models to compare. As companies try for trilingual bots and beyond, it’ll just become a more complicated process. But as language identification improves, so, too, will virtual assistants.
As for now, the abilities of the Google Assistant are pretty untested across languages. Judging by the issues that virtual assistants are still having within just one language, there are likely to be some issues. Last month, the Washington Post did a study to see how good Google Home and Alexa are at understanding accents. For people with nonstandard accents—especially those who don’t speak English natively—there can be a serious understanding gap.
Before long, virtual assistants will be able to understand lots of languages, and that’s a great thing. The United States may seem like a monolingual country, but there are a huge number of bilingual families within its borders. It may seem like a small step forward, but the ability to use technology that doesn’t require monolingual usage is going to be crucial to ensuring a multilingual future.
