The Actions on Google platform for the Google Assistant and upcoming connected devices hosting Google’s voice-enabled artificial intelligence (AI) companion will expand their language support beyond American English, according to Wayne Piekarski, the Senior Developer Advocate at Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) unit. Piekarski took to Google+ earlier today to clarify that Actions on Google still don’t support any other language after a number of new owners of the Google Home smart speaker in the United Kingdom got confused following an accidental announcement that the firm’s Internet-enabled gadget supports British English. As Piekarski explained, that is not the case, but the Mountain View-based tech giant has major plans for expanding Actions on Google to other languages in the future.
Google’s software engineer didn’t go into many details on the matter and only stated that Actions on Google will be available in other languages at some point during the product’s lifecycle, adding that the company’s developers still haven’t set an official release date for that expansion. Nonetheless, Piekarski promised that Google will reveal more details regarding language support for Actions on Google as soon as developers get closer to actually implementing support for more languages into the platform. Due to the current state of affairs, British owners of the Google Home speaker still can’t access a broad range of services that are currently enjoyed by American users and can usually be accessed in the Services menu of the Google Assistant’s Settings.
Actions on Google have been available to third-party developers since late 2016, and in addition to their language limitations, the services can currently only be accessed through the Google Home, while the phone variant of the company’s AI helper still doesn’t support them. Regardless, the Alphabet-owned Internet giant has recently been hard at work expanding the availability of its digital assistant to more consumers, as many smartphones running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and newer builds of its open source operating system started receiving the Google Assistant in recent weeks. Much like Actions on Google, the Google Assistant is still limited in terms of languages it can use, though the companion at least features Google Translate support and can be used for translating simple phrases.