Google's Assistant Is Now Bilingual (theverge.com) 78
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.
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Hopefully, lessig's lawsuit on representation, to SCOTUS, will be seen and won.
Read your own link and stop lying (Score:1)
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'.
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Did you suffer a nasty fall last year when you were 16? You really have reading and moral issues. All you do is LIE.
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
Show us the economical bracket where he won 51% or more. Here is a hint; good luck, idiot.
Im guessing that you were that AC that originally had it wrong.
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You really have reading and moral issues. All you do is LIE.
I already told you to go fuck yourself [slashdot.org] over this Windy. And showed how much of an immoral prick you are. Why are you still trying to push this nonsense idea of yours?
You are still yet to show a single lie, yet you claim it all the time. You like to also claim any random AC is me, it's probably you. You are dishonest enough to pull that shit.
I often point out your lies [slashdot.org] and lies [slashdot.org] more lies [slashdot.org] more lies [slashdot.org] even more lies [slashdot.org] lies [slashdot.org] and lies [slashdot.org] When you aren't lying, you are just making shit up [slashdot.org] that is in no way believable, and lying.
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Unfortunately for Democrats, those three things aren't how you work out who wins the Presidency.
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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 a
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?
American!
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And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?
American!
Or Australian. At least the Americans find Spanish a bit useful.
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I see you read sentence two, where it sounds like it's a higher-order polyglot, but didn't make it to sentence four, where it's bilingual.
Whether that's for reasons of processing power, or language-detection accuracy rates dropping as the number of potential languages goes up, I don't know.
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I'd imagine it's the latter. The more languages you have to consider, the more words are going to appear to match more than one language. I'd expect Spanish and Italian to be challenging even *without* adding a third language.
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I'd expect Spanish and Italian to be challenging even *without* adding a third language.
Indeed. I have found that, as long as you are saying something simple, speaking Spanish in Italy works fairly well.
In the movie "The Tourist" the character played by Johnny Depp speaks Spanish to Italians thru the whole movie.
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And in the movie Mr. Bean's Holiday, Rowan Atkinson's character speaks Spanish to French people through the whole movie. :-D
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Hate to say so, but speaking was jumping the shark for Mr. Bean.
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Oui.
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Shame it doesn't support Chinese yet too. For us the ideal would be English, Japanese and Chinese support so we can both use it in our native and common languages.
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Useless without Esperanto.
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It can automatically decide whether to interpret input in either the selected main language or a selected secondary language. So two languages = bilingual. What did you think it meant?
Re: Bilingual? (Score:2)
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Shhh, we're American over here.
PRISM 2.0 (Score:2)
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Gets to detect all the languages in a house for the security services.
They can already make a good guess by looking at surnames.
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Oblig. Futurama [youtube.com].
Bilingual? Wouldnt that be more like multilingual? (Score:2)
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never used it. never will
Yes you will. Sooner or later, voice input will be the only option for many services.
You won't be able to withdraw money from an ATM without it recognizing your voice, nor will you be able to place an order with the robo-waitress at any restaurant.
Recognizes other languages pointlessly. (Score:3)
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?
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Suddenly, Google Assistant on the wife's phone started. I have no idea what it heard that triggered it, but it wasn't English.
Most likely it was triggered by some random string of phonemes.
Surely Google should know we speak English exclusively? So what's the point?
I watch mostly English movies, but my wife is Chinese so we occasionally watch movies in Mandarin. So Netflix sees that we like "foreign movies" and fills our recommendation list with French, Italian, and German movies, rendering it useless.
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*lol*
Remeinds me of Granny Weatherwax with the "generic foreign language [lspace.org]".
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Have you tried enabling Voice Match in the settings? Then it will only respond to your voice rather than random people or sounds.
You can also disable voice wake up except for in certain circumstances, like when you are in the car using Android Auto.
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Surely Google should know we speak English exclusively? So what's the point?
It's unlikely that it perceived what it heard as another language. This new bilingual feature only works if you set it up, and only with the second language that you choose. More likely, it just heard some phonemes that triggered the "Ok Google" detection, and then couldn't figure out what followed.
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How many do you speak?
Google's Digital Assistant Is Now Bilingual (Score:2)
It understands both Ones AND Zeros!
Multi Lingual ? (Score:2)
Wonder if will speak Klingon, or better yet Tolkien Elvish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
damn it. (Score:2)
Oh, so that's why it no longer works (Score:2)
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.
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Anyone know if I can opt out of this feature/bug?
Easiest way: Don't opt in.
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Anyone know if I can opt out of this feature/bug?
Easiest way: Don't opt in.
I did miss that in the summary, but in Asia (with an account created in the US) it seems to be the default to interpret in multiple languages. I most certainly never told Google Assistant that I speak Chinese, because I don't.
Bilingual Humans (Score:3)
This presumably helps with code-switching [wikipedia.org], 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.
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This presumably helps with code-switching [wikipedia.org], 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.
No, it isn't that clever yet. I just tried it with a few sentences of mixed English and Spanish, and every time it assumed that the entire sentence was in one language, correctly understanding the part that was in that language and finding something phonetically close (ish) for the rest.
I think what it's doing is submitting your words in parallel to all three systems: LangID and the two systems for the languages you have selected. LangID returns its best guess at the language you used, then Assistant gi
Cute idea, but... (Score:2)
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
So it's really hexa-lingual (Score:2)
But it refuses to work in more than 2 languages?
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I think it's even more than those 6, but you can pick 2 out of these 6 that you will be able to use without manually switching the input language.
In other words, these aren't the languages that are understood, but the ones that will be recognized. Which is quite a different thing if you keep in mind that current language recognition is based on a fixed dictionary and picking the word from it that comes closest to what the computer just heard.