Google has been investing a lot lately in making its technologies more accessible in emerging countries like India. From establishing complimentary Wi-Fi zones at railway stations to launching a lightweight version of Android, the company doesn’t seem to want to leave any stone unturned in chasing the next Billion users. Today, it has taken another tiny, yet significant step towards this step. Google has updated its voice assistant so that users can talk to it in Hindi.
Hence, whenever you invoke Google Assistant through any of the gazillion methods and speak in Hindi, it will automatically transcribe the command to English and reply to you in proper Hindi. Based on the few minutes I have spent with it, it possibly doesn’t support follow-up questions in Hindi. Perhaps, that’s coming in a future update. The feature can be enabled by setting “English (India)” as the primary language on your Android phone. Interestingly, if you select “Hindi” instead, Google Assistant says it’s not compatible yet.
A couple of months ago, Google had also announced that it is bringing Assistant to India’s most popular feature phone — Reliance Jio’s JioPhone. Incidentally, Google Assistant had always supported Hindi conversations inside Google’s messaging app, Allo. It’s quite surprising the company took this long for making it widely available.
