Google today updated its Search app for Android and iOS with expanded voice support: in addition to English, the app now understands and speaks French, German, and Japanese. You can download the new version now directly from Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
In case you need proof, below you can see the app answering the following questions: “What is the height of the Eiffel tower?”, “Where can one find some coffee in Munich?”, and “Who invented the transistor?” in French, German, and Japanese, respectively.
Not only can Google speak out answers to your questions in your native language, but it can do that after first interpreting what you’re saying. Don’t expect miracles though: just like the English language, these three new additions have many dialects and accents that make such a feature very hard to perfect.
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Still, Google Search has only supported English speakers up until today. While Google calls this an “international upgrade,” it’s quite obviously just the very early days of regularly adding support for more and more tongues.
Naturally, the company didn’t say when that will be: “Stay tuned as we work to add more languages so you can have a conversation with Google in more and more places around the world.” Given that three languages have been added today though, it’s safe to say that Google is working on implementing more than one at a time.
Based on how Google has added support in the past, and given that some languages are spoken much more widely than others, we’d bet Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese are all on their way.
See also – Google Translate for Android gets faster and simpler speech translation, gestures, support for more languages and Google updates Gesture Search for Android with support for over 40 languages and transliteration
Top Image Credit: RAWKU5
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