Google Assistant will soon add a better translation mode for travelers

Google Assistant has been in the news a lot lately. Last week at IFA 2017, many companies announced that some of their upcoming connected hardware products will support Google’s virtual companion. This week, Google showed off a few upcoming improvements for Assistant at its Developer Days conference, which was held in Krakow, Poland.

During the keynote address for the second day of the conference, Google demoed a new method of how Assistant can help users translate different languages. The new mode will let users say, for example, “Ok, Google, be my French translator.”  After that, when you say something to Assistant, it should translate your words and say them in French, along with showing the translation itself. This command should also work for any other supported Google Assistant language. This could be a huge help for people who are traveling to other countries, but don’t know the native languages.

The keynote also showed how the company is working to improve how Assistant answers questions. In one example, Assistant was asked to name the Tom Cruise movie where “he plays pool and while he plays pool he dances.” Assistant was able to figure out that the correct answer was The Color of Money. In addition, the keynote demo showed how the Assistant team is working to have it understand a person’s voice, even if there’s a lot of outside noise. Assistant can also answer questions faster and can use Google Search more effectively if it get more complex questions. There’s no word on when these improvements will be rolled out, but it’s likely we will seen them in the very near future.

As we mentioned, Google Assistant will soon be supported in a number of upcoming third-party products. That includes new smart speakers made by Harman and Sony, among others. It will also be added to future smart appliances made by LG.