Slashdot Mirror
Google's Assistant Is Now Bilingual (theverge.com)
Google has announced a new feature for Google Assistant: it's bilingual now. The digital assistant will automatically recognize what language is being spoken to it and respond appropriately -- all without requiring you to change any settings. The Verge reports: You'll be able to set up Assistant to understand and respond to any two of the following languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Google adds that it intends on "expanding to more languages in the coming months." The behind-the-scenes tech to make this happen is pretty interesting, as Google explains in an accompanying blog post. To make Assistant receptive to two languages simultaneously, the company created a new language-identification model (which it calls LangID) that runs as soon as the software detects speech.
Assistant actually runs LangID in parallel with two separate language processing models that try to transcribe what's been said in the user's two preset languages. Once LangID has identified the language, Assistant then cancels the incorrect transcription and routes all processing power to focus on the correct one. In order to speed up the process of identification, LangID doesn't just consider vocabulary; it also signals the frequency at which each language is used and the type of device it's used with.
Assistant actually runs LangID in parallel with two separate language processing models that try to transcribe what's been said in the user's two preset languages. Once LangID has identified the language, Assistant then cancels the incorrect transcription and routes all processing power to focus on the correct one. In order to speed up the process of identification, LangID doesn't just consider vocabulary; it also signals the frequency at which each language is used and the type of device it's used with.
Bilingual?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Gets to detect all the languages in a house for the security services.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Zut alors.
Reading over the article it claims that this new update to Google Assistant can understand 6 languages.
Two at a time.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
never used it. never will
The other day, the wife and I were watching a foreign language TV program. No dubbing, just subtitles. I think it was Swedish.
Suddenly, Google Assistant on the wife's phone started. I have no idea what it heard that triggered it, but it wasn't English.
Surely Google should know we speak English exclusively? So what's the point?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Americans are actually majority poor-to-middle-at-best, and Trump supporters are almost entirely brokedick white trash or filthy-rich shady oligarch types. You need to update your stats, the rich Trumpies speak pa Ruskie, comrade.
...at just two languages?
It understands both Ones AND Zeros!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Trump won all voting categories at $50K annual income and higher.
Hillary won all voting categories under $50K annual income.
The only true fact that can be taken from your statement is that you are an ignorant racist.
Wonder if will speak Klingon, or better yet Tolkien Elvish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I really need Tamil for in-laws. They are in their 80s and it would be useful for them to be able to simply talk to turn on lights, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wonder how well it's going to handle Poles speaking English and inserting "kurwa" every second/third word...
Trump could not win a majority in economical brackets, except for 50-100K. In the end, trump won by having large numbers of uneducated vote for him, in the red states.
Hopefully, lessig's lawsuit on representation, to SCOTUS, will be seen and won.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
By income, Clinton led only among voters with a 2015 family income under $50,000 — a group that included 36% of the voters in the exit polls.
So out of the 6 brackets Trump won the highest 4 and Hillary the lowest 2.
PS: what's an 'economical bracket' anyway...
PPS:Trump won the only category that matters, 'votes in the electoral college'.
Trump won from White then not cities and then age. Hillary was only close because of poor and black people.
Like you've been told many times. only the college counts anyway.
Actually, Hillary won the popular vote, and since we do not have equal representation in our election, trump won the electoral vote, which is all that matters.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Announced at the start of the school year.
These guys are good.
The other day, I said something very simple to Google Assistant, and was rewarded with a string of 80% Chinese characters and 20% English words which I had not said. The English was probably wrong because it lacked context (as the rest of the sentence was flagrantly misparsed).
Anyone know if I can opt out of this feature/bug? I assume they are viewing the world as their QA department, planning on the feature not working for a few years until they gather enough data to train the service to do a better job.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Rich old white guys were probably quite economical. He probably didn't need to spend much at all to win them.
You do know that if the red bar is bigger and the number is also bigger, they both mean he won more of that bit right?
She won the popular votes, has longer hair and bigger tits.
Unfortunately for Democrats, those three things aren't how you work out who wins the Presidency.
This presumably helps with code-switching, which bilingual people tend to do all-the-freaking-time. They'll start a sentence in one language, forget how to say something in that language (or don't like how it sounds in that one), then switch to another, sometimes for only a few words before switching back.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Their voice search is multilingual, and has been for years and years. Without attracting any drums and fanfare.
This means that Google Assistant will flirt with me no matter which gender voice it uses!
Who cares about some weirdo jibber jabber language when everyone civilized speaks English?
The word you were looking for is 'civilised'. You abase those who don't speak English when you can't speak it correctly yourself.
It's a cute idea, with an obvious implementation (running both language modules simultaneously). Presumably, part of the input into the language ID is also seeing which language module is successfully making sense of the input.
However... We have a bilingual household (English/German), and part of the reality is also that the languages get mixed. There is always some word in the "other" language that is handy, or maybe you just can't find the word you're looking for. If you're free to talk to your devices in either language, then you will unvermeidlich talk to them in beide Sprachen (inevitably talk to them in both languages). And that will be a lot more challenging...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I speak very standard (Cambridge) English and none of the IVR systems I encounter ever understands me. However, everywhere I have ever worked (more than 30 different companies), people from all different backgrounds reported that I was the easiest to understand of all the people they had ever met.
I, on the other hand, cannot understand the dialogue in a lot of American movies, to the extent that I rarely watch any (not even pirate ones).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
lie - Trump did win
verdict - didn't read/understand own link
Having lived in both the UK and US with an oriental parent who spoke broken English, I have no problem understanding anyone speaking English anywhere in the world, except lower-class black Americans.
lie / false accusation - liar is WindBourne
lie / idiocy / didn't read link - Trump did win more
verdict - dishonourable foolish liar
deceitful - pretending to correct, when agreeing
verdict - dishonourable troll
But it refuses to work in more than 2 languages?
What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?
American!
bickerdyke
Found the buthurt Democrat with modpoints who doesn't understand how the electoral college works.
Still multi- in that it can understand a total of more than two.
If they ahve Dollars, they probably speak American. That is not English by a very long mile.
Americans are a lot closer to standard English than some of the rural British accents. Even a working-class Glasgow or Newcastle accent is a lot tougher than 90% of Americans to understand for me.
Having lived in both the UK and US with an oriental parent who spoke broken English, I have no problem understanding anyone speaking English anywhere in the world, except lower-class black Americans.
That'd be a variant of a Southern accent? If you go to the rural South, you'll hear white folk talkin' same way.
But I do remember in Chicago really struggling, embarrassed, to understand the working-class black accents, while they understood my foreign accent perfectly.
Just like in rural Ireland.
And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?
American!
Or Australian. At least the Americans find Spanish a bit useful.
I've heard quite a few linguists argue that "Ebonics" is a separate language from (American) English, with often a different grammar.
None of the ones I know seem to have any kind of racial agenda, just observing an interesting linguistic phenomenon of a new language being created.
When I'm in the US I also notice a large difference between the languages of people with different ethnical backgrounds, which seems to mean that the society is much more segregated than in for example my own country.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor