latest
Google Meet brings live captions to four new languages on mobile
It's only available in Europe and Asia Pacific for now
The sudden surge in working from home has led Google to heavily invest in its video chat tools, including Google Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet). Last month it gained the ability to accept multiple join requests at once, and now Meet's live caption feature will support more languages.
It's been more than two years since Google Assistant became available in the Brazilian localization of Portuguese, but speakers of the Portugal version (pt-PT) were left waiting. Google has been working on that for over a year, and it began testing it in a closed beta a few months ago, but it appears ready to make it public now.
Back in November, Assistant added support for Brazilian Portuguese, and intelligent speakers were able to communicate with their owners in this language. Unfortunately, smart displays weren't so great at learning a new tongue and couldn't interact with people in Portuguese as quickly as Google Homes. However, the devices have now graduated and are fully fluent in the language, as Nest Hubs and similar devices can now handle conversations em português.
It's hard to believe that Gmail is fifteen years old today. In human years, that would equate to lots of sneaking around, unapproved driving, under-age drinking, and daily existential crisis about everything — i.e. normal teenage drama. But in Gmail years, this means we're getting some demure features. Namely, the email service finally lets us schedule emails.
Read update
- 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 Lens' availability has been expanding ever since its first announcement. Although it started as an exclusive for Pixel owners in Google Photos, it quickly showed up in Assistant too, then rolled to non-Pixel devices in Photos, and eventually made it to those devices in Assistant too. However, through it all, Lens in Assistant and Photos has been limited to one language: English. Até que enfim it's now showing up for users in five other languages: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Google Assistant may be over a year old now, but it still only supports a select number of languages in a few countries. Back in May at Google I/O, it was announced that Assistant would support four more languages, including Brazilian-Portuguese, by the end of the summer. Lo and behold, Google Assistant in a Brazilian-Portuguese flavor is now available in Brazil.
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.
Knowing one language is for chumps. Oops, I might have alienated a huge portion of our readership right there. But seriously, as someone who can read, write, and fluently speak three languages, I swear by the versatility and opportunities that this kind of skill enables. I wouldn't be here on Android Police if I had stuck to my mother tongue, would I?
I love Update Wednesdays, and today we've already seen pretty decent updates to several Google apps. As you've already seen, Google Play Games was updated to v1.5, but the one I'm excited about the most is, without a doubt, Google TTS v3.0, which made a jump today from v2.4.
Well, it's a start. While the Skype app for Android still has a bizarre and uncomfortable habit of forcing landscape mode, today's update at least allows users to use the portrait orientation if they're making a call. That's nice. Especially since the positioning of front-facing cameras on devices like the Nexus 7 make landscape video chats extremely awkward. Now if only we could get this for the rest of the interface, that would be great.
Under the hood of Google Now, powering all those beautiful cards that pop up when you search for certain things, is Google's Knowledge Graph. In what might be the company's most ambitious project ever, Google aims to categorize and classify all information so that when you search for, say, Jeff Goldbum, the search engine knows you might also be interested in information about Chaos Theory or survival tips for raptor attacks. Today, the company announced an extension to this already-huge product: availability in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian. Pretty huge.