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Google Assistant Coming to Android Messages, Adds Support for 7 New Indic Languages

Google Assistant Coming to Android Messages, Adds Support for 7 New Indic Languages

By Jagmeet Singh | Updated: 26 February 2019 12:49 IST

Google Assistant will be accessed on Android Messages through suggestion chips

Highlights

Google Assistant support will initially be available for English users
Google has also expanded multilingual support
Jio Phone users will be able to use Google Assistant for voice typing

Google Assistant is set to make way to Android Messages. This new move is designed to let you use the Google Assistant to add information to your text messages. Alongside the expansion, Google has brought seven new Indic languages to the Google Assistant. This will specifically help users in India talk to the Google Assistant in Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Urdu. The search giant has also brought multilingual support for additional languages to make the Assistant capable of being a useful artificial intelligence (AI) model for a large number of mobile users.

Notably, Google had brought the Assistant integration within its Allo chat app in the past. But since the Allo is departing next month, Google is now all set to bring a similar, smart texting experience directly to the Android Messages app that comes preloaded on a large number of smartphones. The company says in a blog post that over the coming months, the Messages app will start showing suggestions directly from the Google Assistant about movies, restaurants, and weather. The feature will initially be limited to English users, though.

Users will be able to access the Google Assistant in the Messages app after tapping suggestion chips available just below their messages. The suggestion chips are touted to be based what's available on the thread.

Once you tap one of the suggestion clips, the Messages app will open the Google Assistant to help you with the relevant information. You would also be able to long press the Home button with the Messages app open on your device and then the Assistant will pop up to help.

In addition to bringing the Assistant to the Messages app, Google is bringing as many as eight new Indian languages, including Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Urdu. The company importantly brought Marathi and Hindi last year.

The Google Assistant has also expanded the multilingual experience and now lets you select language pairing from Danish, Dutch, Korean, Hindi, Norwegian, and Swedish in addition to the existing languages, including English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, and Italian.

At the CES last month, Google announced the Assistant integration within Google Maps. The company is now expanding its integration by bringing the experience to all Assistant phone languages. It has also partnered with vendors such as Xiaomi, Vivo, and TCL to bring a dedicated Google Assistant button on various new Android devices.

Google is also bringing a Voice Typing feature to KaiOS. This enables the Google Assistant to translate speech to text directly from a feature phone, such as the Jio Phone. "With the cursor in the right field, you can press and hold the Assistant button on your phone and use your voice to dictate your text messages, web searches or anything else that has a text field," Google Assistant Vice President Manuel Bronstein wrote in its blog post while explaining the voice typing feature.

Google has also added the ability to use a different language for the Google Assistant in your KaiOS phone while keeping the phone's language in English. This will help you communicate using the Assistant in your native language while using the phone's menu and settings in English.

"In the coming months, developers will be able to release their Actions on Android 9 Pie (Go edition) and KaiOS devices so entry-level smartphone and feature phone owners can access more locally relevant experiences," said Bronstein.

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