A Look at the Number of Languages Popular Voice Assistant Services Support (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Contrary to popular Anglocentric belief, English isn't the world's most-spoken language by total number of native speakers -- nor is it the second. In fact, the West Germanic tongues rank third on the list, followed by Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, and Russian. (Mandarin and Spanish are first and second, respectively.) Surprisingly, Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana recognize only a relatively narrow slice of these.

Google Assistant: With the addition of more than 20 new languages in January, the Google Assistant took the crown among voice assistants in terms of the number of tongues it understands. It's now conversant in 30 languages in 80 countries, up from 8 languages and 14 countries in 2017.
Apple's Siri: Apple's Siri, which until January had Google Assistant beat in terms of sheer breadth of supported languages, comes in a close second. Currently, it supports 21 languages in 36 countries and dozens of dialects for Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Microsoft's Cortana: Cortana, which made its debut at Microsoft's Build developer conference in April 2013 and later came to Windows 10, headphones, smart speakers, Android, iOS, Xbox One, and even Alexa via a collaboration with Amazon, might not support as many languages as Google Assistant and Siri. Still, it has come a long way in six years.
Amazon's Alexa: Alexa might be available on over 150 products in 41 countries, but it understands the fewest languages of any voice assistant: English (Australia, Canada, India, UK, and US), French (Canada, France), German, Japanese (Japan), and Spanish (Mexico, Spain).
Samsung's Bixby: Samsung's Bixby -- the assistant built into the Seoul, South Korea company's flagship and midrange Galaxy smartphone series and forthcoming Galaxy Home smart speaker -- is available in 200 markets globally but only supports a handful of languages in those countries: English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.

Comments

Bit of a Strawman

[Kunedog]

Contrary to popular Anglocentric belief, English isn't the world's most-spoken language by total number of native speakers

Correct, it simply has the most speakers, period.

Total Wealth of All Speakers

[Roger W Moore]

It's worth pointing out that English is the second most spoken language in the world and arguably the most widely spoken language since the only one with more speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is predominantly only spoken in one country that has a less-than-open market. It is also the language of three of the G7 countries.

These are probably more relevant facts than the total number of native speakers if you are making money by selling a product. This is undoubtedly why French, German, Italian and Japanese, which are the languages of the other G7 members, also feature prominantly. Given that the current state of voice recognition is that it doesn't work very well for supported languages it is hardly surprising that it has not been rolled out beyond those languages with the largest and most accessible economies.

Re:Total Wealth of All Speakers

[yes-but-no]

So number of speakers is irrelevant; it's the purchasing power a group controls. In common parlance how rich /wealthy a group is. money chases new source of money/revenue. If there are a billion people with hardly any purchasing power, what's the use is making product for them.

Re:Total Wealth of All Speakers

[AmiMoJo]

Google's speech recognition is excellent. It supports multiple languages at the same time, so my wife or I can talk to it in English, Japanese or Chinese and it responds in the same. It does incredibly well with tricky things like place names too.

It's very handy when one of us can't remember the right word or phrase in our non-native languages. Just ask it "how do I say X in Japanese".

Re:Total Wealth of All Speakers

[ledow]

Personally, I find all speech recognition absolute trash.

This applies to everything from Ford in-car recognition through to Siri, Alexa and the Google assistants.

You all have to stop speaking. Then you have to state clearly your phrase. Then, literally something like 20-30% of the time it's completely unable to recognise even in a clean-room environment.

Even if I speak perfectly to them, it's quicker just to type, every single time. Even if that means getting up, going to my phone, picking it up, signing into it, going into Google, and typing.

People laugh me off when I say this and then I watch them try three or four times and NOT NOTICE they are doing that. And that's with simple keyword-laden phrases in a clean-room sound environment ("Alexa, sing me a song" is the one most people go for).

That's before you even get CLOSE to speaking to a native speaker about things like Google Translate, etc. They will laugh you out of the room more often than not. They are pathetic at translation, beyond how to say hello, order a salmon or sing happy birthday. The tourist-phrases, they work because the listener is more forgiving of you. Individual words basically play "thesaurus" for you. You try and translate a business document and you'll be laughed out of the contract.

I used to live with an Italian and I sat in a room full of Italian relatives (not a million miles from English, and quite an easy language to parse by audio) for about an hour with a translate app and we gave up on audio about 10 minutes in. Even then the translations often gave spontaneous bursts of laughter on both sides.

People really overblow speech recognition. You're clean-rooming it, multiple-retrying it, conveniently ignoring it's mistakes and re-interpreting it without realising.

P.S. I'm native English, only speak English, only ever spoken English. I work in private schools, so my pronunciation can be made perfect in one flick of my brain. One sales guy suggested that teachers write their school reports via Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I laughed so hard I had to leave the room when I was told that. Guess what... despite dozens of trials of all kinds of software, nobody has ever done it, even for a single child, even for a single report, even for a single subject, despite the fact that we use Google Docs for everything (so teachers could happily dictate into a Google Doc)

Samsung's Bixby does *not* support those languages

[jerome]

"Samsung's Bixby: Samsung's Bixby [...] only supports a handful of languages in those countries: English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Korean, and Spanish."

AFAIK, until recently, Bixby (the voice assistant) did not understand German, French, Italian or Spanish. This was quite a letdown for us european customers. Has this changed recently ?

My cat codes too

[DrYak]

and is the language you code in (statements and commands of any mainstream language are english)

Some of us (and not all of those are cats) do code in Perl, you insensitive clod !

(Now switching the keyboard back into punctuation mode, I've got some work to do).

It's an *Assistant*

[DrYak]

The article speaks about *assistants*. Things supposed to be helping non-technical people (even if we /.ers know that the real purpose is to monetize private information).

Most of the people would probably prefer use their everyday language in which they the most fluent when speaking to their accessory, not a secondary language that they have some knowledge of (because it's a popular one in lots of fields) but that they don't use frequently every day.

That's even what the /. summary attempts to point out, yes some knowledge of English is frequent, but what people actually speak in everyday is completely different.

If Google, Apple and co want to have a chunk of the giant juicy Chinese market, they better sell a service that can be use in language that these people are fluent in (Mandarin. Cantonese, etc.) not some language that some fraction of the population had some lessons of back when they were teens, and never had any actually real-world experience of and have barely uttered a single word there of.

Imagine if your assistant could only speak Spanish / German / French / whatever other language you learned in high school and never spoke again. Would you be as eager to use it ?

That's why "native speaker" is much more relevant in the specific contact of TFA rather than "has some knowledge of English".

German? I disbelieve that.

[Opportunist]

Given that it's trivial for the average German to ensure not even another native speaker from another dialect group understands a single word they say, I highly doubt that Siri manages to speak all the hundreds of dialects available.

Try it. Learn German. Learn it really well. Then go into some small Bavarian town and ask some old person for directions. Then wonder whether you learned the right language or whether you're in the wrong country.

Chinese market

[sjbe]

Western companies are generally excluded from the Chinese market by The Great Firewall and state sanctioned discrimination. So, there is probably little incentive to spend precious resources Chinese consumers.

A) There are plenty of western companies doing business in China quite successfully. I've been there and seen them first hand. That said the Chinese government definitely favors the home team so to speak but perhaps not to the degree you've been led to believe. Doing business in China is challenging but not impossible for foreign companies.
B) There is LOTS of incentive to spend resources on Chinese customers. The sheer size of the market ensures that. The question is how much opportunity they are afforded to go after those customers.

Furthermore the differences in English dialects are very small compared to e.g. Chinese and Arabic. So it may be a stretch to compare the numbers directly and furthermore not taking purchasing power into account.

I'm not familiar with Arabic dialects but spoken Mandarin may as well be a different language between different parts of the country. Chinese is a tonal language which makes local dialects really hard to understand in some cases. WAY worse than just an English speaker with a thick local dialect. Imagine that having a US Southern accent instead of a US Midwest accent and that actually changed the meaning of words and you get a crude idea idea of the problem. I've been to China with native speakers and going from Shanghai to Chengdu our translators had a really hard time understanding what was being said. The written language is consistent but the spoken language could almost be considered dozens of related but different languages.

Interestingly in some cases it was easier for our translators to speak to each other in English than to try to understand each other in Mandarin because of the regional tonal differences.

Re:Subtle anti-Microsoft slant

[Iwastheone]

Cortana is currently available in English, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese language editions, depending on the software platform and region in which it is used. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...