Google on Thursday at the Digital News Initiative (DNI) summit in Amsterdam reportedly announced that it would be expanding Google Assista...
Google on Thursday at the Digital News Initiative (DNI) summit in Amsterdam reportedly announced that it would be expanding Google Assistant to several more locales in more countries, with support coming for local languages in 2018. A slide from Google's official announcement has surfaced online detailing the number and list of countries that Assistant would be available in by the end of this year. Apart from that, new languages will be added, including a few from India.
Dutch journalist Elgar van der Wel took to Twitter to reveal this important slide from Google's DNI Summit keynote. Statistics from the slide show that Google Assistant will soon be available in 52 countries globally, up almost three times from the current 14. Apart from that, the virtual assistant will see its presence in 64 locales across these countries, up 300 percent from 2017's count of 16. And, lastly, supported languages will go up by 17 from the previous 8 to 25 in 2018.
The announcement also hints at an expanded availability of the Google Home smart speaker in countries including India, although there is no official word around the same. Google might be looking to compete with the likes of Apple's HomePod and Amazon Echo pretty soon. Google Assistant runs on Android phones running Android Lollipop and above, Google Home devices, and several third-party devices (some of them launched at CES 2018).
Google Assistant, last month, got updated to support Hindi, albeit for a limited number of voice command queries. While there was no official correspondence, Assistant did respond to Hindi queries that can be activated only after "Hey Google" or "OK Google" is said in English.
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