Google Assistant Actions Now Support More Languages and Locales, Multilingual Support for More Languages Too
- Users can now build Actions in 19 languages across 28 locales
- Improved TTS voices for English (en-US, en-GB, en-AU), Dutch, French (fr-FR and fr-CA), German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Japanese, Korean, Polish, Danish, and Swedish to start rolling out to Actions in the coming weeks.
- Users can now offer transactions in 22 markets with an Action
- Action templates for trivia and personality quizzes are now available for English (en-US and en-UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi and Indonesian.
- Users can talk to their Assistant in eight Indic languages
- Assistant supports its bilingual feature in 6 more languages: Korean, Hindi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch
Google is making several announcements today out of the Mobile World Congress, one of them is the support for more languages and locales. Users can now build Actions in 19 languages across 28 locales, access templates in 10 languages, offer transactions in 22 markets, and use the text-to-speech voice option for Actions in 12 languages.
Eight New Indic Languages Available Today
Last summer Google announced that Marathi was supported by Google Assistant, with seven more Indic languages to follow. Today, Google has announced those languages are Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu. Users can say, “Ok, Google, talk to me in Bengali” to initiate the feature.
Assistant’s multilingual support was introduced late August 2018, allowing users to choose between six different languages, and switch back and forth between two of those. Those six languages are English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian. Today, Google is rolling out integration with any pairing of Korean, Hindi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch or the existing languages.
Increasing the support of more languages and locales means that more people around the world will have the ability to contribute to the development of Google Assistant. It also means that Google can work on catching up to Amazon Alexa’s vast number of skills. Voicebot reported last week that as of January 2019, the number of Google Assistant Actions rose about 2.5 times last year compared to 2.2 times the growth for Amazon Alexa skills. However, even with a comparable growth rate, the overall number of Google Actions is nowhere near the overall number of Alexa skills. In January 2019, there were 4,253 official Google Actions in the U.S., which is about 7.5% of the 56,750 Alexa skills in the U.S.
