It has been pretty clear from previous announcements that 2018 will be the year that Google puts Google Assistant in all the things. But in an announcement today, the scope of growth that the Mountain View company has for Assistant itself became a bit more clear. And it is impressive.
First, the plan is to have Google Assistant available in no less than 30 languages by the end of the year. That, in their words, would get Assistant to 95% of the Android install base globally. This is something that we got a hint about earlier this month but now it is confirmed officially.
Coupled with this will be multilingual support for Assistant. Many households around the world are multilingual and this new feature will allow you to speak to it in different languages throughout your day. The language support will start with English, French, and German initially but will roll out to other languages as the year progresses.
Starting in just a couple of weeks, users of Assistant in the US will be able to leverage Routines. Routines allow you to do multiple things with Assistant with one command.
In the coming weeks in the U.S., you’ll be able to use six routines that help with your morning, commutes to and from work, and evening at home. For example, say “Hey Google, I’m home” and the Assistant on your Google Home or phone can turn on the lights, share any home reminders, play your favorite music and more, all with just four words.
Finally, there will also be support for location based reminders through Google Assistant and your Google Home or other Assistant enabled smart speaker. What this means is that you can set a reminder through Google Home and when you get to that location, you will get a reminder from Assistant on your phone. Right now you can only do location based reminders on your phone.
You can expect that this coming week at Mobile World Congress there will be more news and information about Google Assistant. Much like CES in January, it looks like Google is going to be making a big splash at MWC.
It’s working for me in a while now, it works when I speak portuguese and English, and even using words of both languages in a same sentence.