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Google Lens translation coming to Assistant for KaiOS feature phones
With support for English and a bunch of Indian languages
With Google’s backing, KaiOS has been able to deliver a host of smartphone-like apps and services to its feature phone users who aren’t just ready to make the jump yet. The devices running KaiOS have so far picked up support for popular apps like WhatsApp, YouTube, Google Maps, and even Assistant, although as stripped-down versions. Google is now enhancing the Assistant’s capabilities on the OS by integrating Lens’ camera translate mode, which works with a handful of Indian languages from the get-go.
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The Google Assistant may be a polyglot among its AI-powered virtual brethren, but what mars the experience is its lingual inconsistency across supported platforms. Even though it’s been conversing in Hindi and Vietnamese on phones for long, the support for Android TV was just added. The two Asian languages join a small list of languages that the Assistant can understand and speak on your big screen.
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You can't underestimate the benefits of a good education, and one of the first pillars of that is the ability to read. When I travelled to Nepal a couple of months ago, I was astonished by how thirsty for learning children in rural areas are. In the afternoon, many were being dropped off by their bus miles away from any village and had to (literally) trek up hills to get back home. In the morning, many could be seen carrying their backpacks and walking for at least half an hour or more just to get to their school or bus. And us privileged folks complain about waking up early to catch the bus that picks us up right from our doorstep! This is why I'm happy to see Google take learning to heart with its new Bolo reading app.
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- According to an update made to the Language and Locale Support section of the Actions on Google documentation site, these new higher-quality WaveNet voices will start to roll out on March 4th. The new voices provide users of the Actions on Google platform with voices that meet or exceed a 3.6 mean opinion score (i.e., which provide better perceived quality than the previous TTS voices used).
As with most of Google's products, Assistant is an incredibly powerful tool in the United States, but its functionality is limited in other countries. This is understandable, since there are dozens of other major languages worldwide with countless dialects, and speech recognition for each variation can take a while to develop. At Mobile World Congress, Google announced a massive expansion for Assistant's language support.
Google Assistant's language expansion is continuing on. Google had promised that 38 countries and 17 languages would be added in 2018 and many have already launched over the past months. But the year is nearing its end and we're still a little far from those numbers. Recent additions bring us closer though, as Assistant can now speak four more Indian languages and has expanded Brazilian Portuguese' support to Google Home speakers.
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- Google has officially announced support for Hindi on Google Home.
Google Assistant gained support for Hindi in March, then Google Home and Home Mini launched in India in April. You would think that one is related to the other and that users in India were able to speak to Home in Hindi, but that was not true. Their phones supported Hindi as well as English (India), but their smart speakers only understood and spoke the latter. But that's changing now.
Google Translate's camera mode, which allows you to highlight text from pictures to read them in your native language, is still one of the best real-world implementations of machine learning. Earlier this year, a handful of new Indian languages were added to the camera mode, and now 13 more are supported.
Google isn't the only American tech giant improving on its Indian language support — Amazon has now launched a Hindi version of its Indian app and mobile website. It will be the first among India's other major e-commerce platforms to offer an Indian language version.
Google has a massive user base in India, but, until recently, there's been a dearth of Google products that support Indian languages. At this year's Google for India event, the company announced that it is taking strides to correct that.
If English isn't your native language, you're likely to come across a lot of new words online. As is often the case these days, the first thing you turn to is Google. A simple search for the word gives you a definition card with its different meanings, synonyms, antonyms, and some examples of sentences containing it. But if you live in India, you may start seeing a change in the way definitions are displayed.
Google Assistant's language support is, to put it mildly, dumbfounding. The list of languages that you can talk to Assistant in varies between phones, tablets, smartwatches, speakers, Google Home, Allo, TVs, Autos, and every other medium you can find it on. But sooner or later, they start catching up to each other, and now two new languages are making their way to Assistant on Wear OS: Spanish and Hindi.
Actions on Google, the developer backbone behind third-party Google Assistant integrations, is getting more and more capable with time. Last time we saw it get updated, it learned new languages, got better discoverability for the apps, and added notifications, a personalized experience, and more. With this new update, there's even more in tow, so let's get started.
Google Assistant's language support is beyond confusing. I've been covering it for over 6 months now and I still don't understand why a language could work in one version of Assistant but not another. Take Hindi for example. It works in Allo, but not in other instances of Assistant like the main one on your phone. That's changing though now.
Google's Allo chat program remains the only way to access the cool Assistant voice control tools without spending money (either on a new Pixel phone or a Google Home gadget). But as with a lot of Google products, it seems fairly focused on the American market. Today its Smart Reply linguistic powers get widened to two of the next-most-spoken languages on the planet, Hindi and Brazilian Portuguese. Support seems to be rolling out via a server-side switch, so don't be surprised if you can't immediately change to either language.
The English alphabet only includes 26 different letters, but for many other languages that are not descendant from Latin, the number of valid characters is much larger. It turns out that this can make creating a keyboard that works well in those languages a bit difficult — imagine having a keyboard with hundreds or thousands of keys and you begin to get the picture. That's why Google has developed dedicated keyboard apps with alternative input methods specifically designed for languages such as Pinyin or Cantonese to make is easier for many (or maybe even most) users around the world to type in their native tongue.
Those of us who live in countries where multiple languages are spoken have to always walk the thin line between them, choose which one is the default on their phone, find a keyboard that handles several languages well, and continuously pick their preferred language in Google search results.
India is big. Really big, and really complicated. I don't think it's possible for an American white guy like me to wrap his head around a place where every region has languages, dialects, and cultures that are found nowhere else on the planet, yet are still ostensibly united into a single country. That being the case, having a single keyboard to support India as a whole, where many of its residents rely on their regional language and actually speak English better than (or instead of) Hindi, seems a little odd.
Updates to Google's Text-to-Speech app aren't always interesting, but today's bump actually brings with it two new languages. For those waiting for Hindi and Indonesian language support, it's your lucky day.
If you don't use any language with a non-Latin alphabet, you've probably seen at least one of Google's alternative language keyboards and promptly dismissed it. But for a huge portion of Android's userbase, those things are essential tools for daily interaction. Today almost every one of Google's customized input/keyboard apps has been given a major update: Google Hindi Input, Google Japanese Input, Google Korean Input, Google Pinyin Input, and Google Zhuyin Input.