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Google Play Store could soon make app search easier for millions of users
Jul 28, 2026 — 10:52 AM ET
- The Google Play Store’s native voice search feature is currently restricted to English, forcing non-English speakers to rely on keyboard dictation workarounds.
- We’ve spotted an unreleased voice language selector in the works, supporting over 20 languages with quick toggles for recent selections.
- The feature, in its current development state, lacks automatic language detection, so speech is transcribed into the language that is manually active at the time.
Google is constantly refining the Play Store with UI updates and subtle tweaks, but a significant quality-of-life feature is currently in the works for multilinguals. In the latest Google Play Store v52.4.41-34, we managed to enable an upcoming feature that adds dedicated multi-language support to the Play Store’s built-in voice search tool.
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Currently, the Play Store’s native voice search button is strictly limited to English. Even if your device’s system language is set to Spanish, Hindi, or French, tapping the microphone icon in the Play Store search bar opens a voice search interface that only accepts English speech. While users can always rely on their keyboard’s built-in voice dictation as a workaround, the app’s native voice search has clearly lagged behind.
In the near future, Google will fix this limitation by introducing a new voice language selection button directly within the Play Store’s voice search interface.
Tapping this button will open a dedicated language selector, which could feature over 20 supported languages.
Once a language is selected, the Play Store will accept, transcribe, and execute search queries in that chosen language.
In our brief testing of the feature in its current in-development state, once we set the language to Hindi, the Play Store could recognize Hindi terms. However, the voice search feature does not support automatic language detection. If you speak in English while Hindi is selected, the Play Store will attempt to transcribe your speech into the Hindi script.
To make switching between languages easier, the Play Store will remember your recently used languages, so you can toggle between them with a quick tap.
Play Store’s language selector for voice search is not yet live. We hope Google improves the feature and rolls it out in a future update, helping a large number of multilingual users.
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