Story by
Emil Protalinski
Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, incl Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, including Ars Technica, Neowin, TechSpot, ZDNet, and CNET. Stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Google today updated its Google Search app for Android with support for handling multiple languages at once in voice search. You can download the new version now directly from Google Play.
You could use voice search in multiple languages (more than 50 in total) before, but you had to change your settings if you wanted to switch languages. Now you can tweak your settings once, and then switch back and forth between languages as you see fit.
The app lets you select up to five languages in total (Search => Settings => Voice => Languages), and Google will automatically detect which language you’re using. Whether you get a spoken response depends on the language you use, as Google Search can’t yet reply vocally in all the supported languages. The other limitation is that you need to stick to one language per sentence, but that seems rather reasonable.
Overall, this is quite the technical achievement. As the company puts it, “More than half the world’s population speaks two or more languages—and now Google can keep up.”
Thumbnail image credit: Kimhiro Hoshino/Getty Images
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