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Google Assistant will soon know two dozen more languages

The voice assistant will be available in more than 30 languages in all by year's end.

Ben Fox Rubin Former senior reporter
Ben Fox Rubin was a senior reporter for CNET News in Manhattan, reporting on Amazon, e-commerce and mobile payments. He previously worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and got his start at newspapers in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Ben Fox Rubin
2 min read
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Google Home Mini uses Google Assistant.

Chris Monroe/CNET

Google Assistant is about to learn a bunch of new tongues.

In the next few months the search company's digital assistant will be able to respond by text in Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai on Android phones and Apple iPhones. By the end of this year, the assistant will be available in more than 30 languages, reaching 95 percent of all eligible Android phones worldwide, Nick Fox, Google's vice president of product, said in a blog post Friday.

The assistant currently responds in eight languages by text on Android phones: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Fox said Google Assistant will also gain multilingual speech later this year, allowing the assistant to understand you fluently in multiple languages, instead of just one language. This feature will start with English, French and German, with support for more languages coming later. On the Google Home smart speaker, the assistant can currently be set to understand one language: English, French, German or Japanese.

"If you prefer to speak German at work, but French at home, your assistant is right there with you," he said in the post.

Google also said Friday that starting over the next week, the company will add two new features to its assistant: routines and location-based reminders.

Routines allow you to get the assistant to do multiple things all at once with one command. For example, saying a command like, "Hey Google, good night," could turn out the lights, draw the blinds and turn on calming music from your Google Home device.

In the coming weeks, you also be able to set reminders on your phone based on locations. That way you can get your assistant to remind you to buy more eggs or bread while at the grocery store.