As with most of Google's products, Assistant is an incredibly powerful tool in the United States, but its functionality is limited in other countries. This is understandable, since there are dozens of other major languages worldwide with countless dialects, and speech recognition for each variation can take a while to develop. At Mobile World Congress, Google announced a massive expansion for Assistant's language support.

Google added multilingual support to Google Assistant last year; you could start a timer in English, while someone else (on the same device) could ask for the weather in Spanish. This was initially limited to just six languages, but Google is now adding more to the mix. In addition to the existing support for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, six more are available — Korean, Hindi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch.

Other Assistant features are also expanding to new languages. Multiple actions are now available in French and German, Assistant in Maps is coming to all languages, 'transactional experiences' (actions involving purchases) are now offered in 22 markets. Finally, action templates are available in English (US and UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi and Indonesian.

You may recall that Google improved Assistant's voice in 2017, when the company started using the 'WaveNet' neural network that it acquired in 2014. Google is now introducing new WaveNet voices for actions in English (en-US, en-GB and en-AU), Dutch, French (fr-FR and fr-CA), German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Japanese, Korean, Polish, Danish and Swedish. Samples of the new voices can be found here.

Finally, users in India are now able to talk to Assistant in seven new languages — Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. Google previously added support for Hindi and Marathi last year.