Alexa, Are You Bilingual?
I hope so.
I live in France, the Echo isn’t yet available here, but I got one months ago and I’m using it in English only. This year, Amazon will add French support, and it will be very helpful if Alexa can understand both of them at the same time.
I can understand that for a US customer, one language is sufficient, but for me as a European customer, the more Alexa can handle simultaneously, the better it will be. Let me explain that with some examples:
- Local addresses: As far as I know, voice search for an address is feasible only in the native language(s), for example in France, looking for address will be only in French. No one will change the settings to just find the way to go to local places.
- Skills in one language: Not all developers will translate their Alexa skills in different languages, and it will be very bad to disable a skill just because you are not using the correct language. Imagine if you had to change your phone language to use an app.
- Learn new language: Alexa can be a powerful tool for kids and students to learn new languages, and that can be possible only if Alexa can interact in the native language plus the learned one, like asking Alexa how to say “Hello” in Japanese, and say it back to check the pronunciation.
- Google Search: Alexa and other voice assistants are intended to become the next step of search engines. Google is already bilingual, you can start typing your sentence in any language, and it will auto-complete it.
I’m not the best speech recognition expert here, but here how I see it:
- Enabling at least two languages in the app, let say English and French.
- User requests will be sent to English and French cloud speech recognition.
- The best* answer will be sent back to the user.
*Easy to say than to code, because there is lot of arbitration to handle here.
I did another hope in the past for a display with my project AlexaGUI, and it was done later with the Echo Show. Let’s be optimistic with this one too.
Do you think that digital assistants will be bilingual?
