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With the recent launch of the Spanish language integration into Google Home, Google is preparing to gain even more ground against Amazon's Amazon devices. The addition of Spanish-language features expands Google's share of the digital assistant market in the United States and beyond in Mexico and Spain. Alexa currently supports only three languages, including English, German and Japanese, while Google Home will offer more than 30 languages by 2019. While Alexa is lagging behind, many wonder why it took so long to make multilingual digital assistants. could be lost in translation
"No hay pedo" is Mexican slang meaning "there is no problem", but it translates into English as "there is no problem" no fart. " Does not work quite, is not it? Language and culture are filled with so many nuances specific to this region and dialect. Even English has a lot of variations of phrases and words depending on your origin. A digital assistant who knows and speaks a language is different from the simple translation.
"How to address a friend in relation to an acquaintance?" What is the appropriate time for dinner? What jokes are appropriate? What jokes are funny? "Said Kelly Davis, head of the company. machine learning at Mozilla in an email interview for this article. "The list is endless and not only language specific, but culturally specific." The jokes that work in Spain may be offensive to Mexico. "
Taking these differences into account takes a great deal of time and effort. ;efforts. Companies need to do research to understand these small nuances and turn them into code. Which means that even the biggest companies in the world, like Amazon, have to invest several years in locating their assistants. Amazon has even made some progress towards crowdsource learning with Cleo, a language tool powered by Alexa that is learning from its users.
"You will need thousands of hours of this data from tens of thousands of people, and this needs to be done for every language and for every accent of that language that you want to recognize.This is a painstaking work, and there are no bullets, "said Davis
Opportunities missed meanwhile
Although we finally see tech giants like Google extend their offerings to people who speak a greater variety of languages, companies that create digital assistants will always prefer majority languages and cash markets, while Amazon covers the markets that it believes are the most profitable in the world. Currently, it still leaves many Spanish-speaking countries around the world and much of the United States is composed of Hispanic Americans.
One of the major failures of Alexa this summer is the incapacity I answer questions about the World Cup in one of the most common languages among football fans. There are more than 20 Spanish-language channels and networks available in the United States alone, which means that Amazon lacks DVR integrations for households and common surveys like "Alexa, has qua hora es el parti of the Copa Mundial? " is the World Cup?). These simple integrations translate into a large number of sold units that will likely go to Google Home until Alexa devices support more languages.
But the potential impact of adding multiple languages to digital assistants goes well beyond meetings. and controlling a smart home. Assistants who can speak more languages offer opportunities to make the world more accessible to their users in many ways.
"Think about how minority language users could use speech recognition to allow more people to access technology. Internet services can provide even if they have never learned to read? Davis said, "Market forces will not reach these people."
The world of digital assistants is booming, these huge technological advances are appearing in more households than ever before, and with With the added pressure of Google Home's increased linguistic offer, we can only hope that Amazon will catch up by allowing us to say "Hola Alexa" soon. [19659004] Cassie Tolhurst is a writer who contributes to Geek Girl and Stanford College Puzzle.
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