The New Feature

This week Google blew away competitors at the IFA tech show. They announced many devices that they were improving. Google Assistant was one that really got the public’s attention, it’s bilingual now. This is how Google Assistant usually works: when you would ask a question, it would recognize the voice you’re speaking instantaneously.

However, if you wanted to change Google Assistant to speak a different language, you would have to manually change it in factory settings. Now you don’t have to do that anymore; the device can respond to two languages simultaneously. English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese are the languages that Google Assistant knows.

And they’re more to come. Google constructed a new language-identification model (LangID), that helps understand two languages at the same time. The program works by running parallel with the two languages, separate. LangID then tries to transcribe what’s being said in the user’s two languages. When LangID finds the correct language, Google Assistant will cancel the wrong transcription, and tries to focus on the correct one.

By the end of the year, Google will add 30 more languages to Google Assistant. So far, it can only understand 15.