Google started a wide roll out of Assistant almost exactly a year ago, supporting only English. Since then, the company has added support for French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Google today announced that over the next 10 months, it will work to add support for at least 22 more languages, which will include Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Thai.
This would bring the total number of languages that the Assistant can respond in to 30, but the company intends to support even more languages. Google says that, by supporting these languages, it would cover 95% of all Android phones eligible for Assistant.
In addition to being able to speak in these languages, Google is working on making Assistant be able to distinguish between them; starting “later this year,” Assistant will be able to detect what language a user is speaking, and respond to the query accordingly. This feature will work for English, French, and German speaking users, with support for more languages added "over time."
It's worth noting, however, that the Assistant can understand users speaking in English, French, German, and Japanese right now - it just cannot automatically distinguish between them, with the user having to set their preferred language in settings. There's also no mention of whether Assistant will understand users mixing multiple languages in a single query or sentence.
Google also announced the launch of Routines for Assistant today, as well as location-based reminders. Additionally, the company says that it’s working with its hardware partners as well as mobile carriers to more deeply integrate Assistant with their products and services.
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