Aditya Madanapalle

Google Assistant has added support for Hindi and Brazilian in Google Allo. Users of the Google Pixel, or the instant messaging app, Allo, can start using the Assistant in Hindi. Google announced the roll out in The Keyword blog, and the feature is now available in India. There is no update to the Allo app, if you already have it installed. To initiate a conversation in Hindi, type or speak "talk to me in Hindi" to Google Assistant.

https://twitter.com/google/status/805890648733810688

Yes, Brazil has a bunch of stickers in the update as well. However, there are plenty of stickers already available in Allo, from Indian artists. As far as Assistant is concerned, the features mostly work as well as the English language version. Users can request weather information, play games with Allo or in a group, set alarms and alerts, find out scores of cricket matches, find out show times of movies, as questions, look for places to eat and more. The language used by Google Assistant is a little formal though, even when delivering cat pictures.

One of our favorite features in Google Assistant is that you can request it for poetry, and it delivers one on the spot from a vast repertoire of poems, from sonnets to free verse to haiku from poets all around the world. In Hindi though, the range appears to be limited at the moment, with Google only delivering Dohas from Kabir.

Bollywood Emoji Quiz is another favorite game of ours, a game perfect for playing with groups of friends. The quiz makes you guess bollywood movies based on emoji strings. With Google Assistant in Hindi, answering the quiz with voice input was a hit and miss affair. For Bollywood movies with English language titles, the voice input was caught in English at times. So "Life in A Metro" was not transliterated in Hindi automatically. However, "Rockstar" was. There is no consistency in what language the Assistant displays your text string in. The game works perfectly in the English language.

Voice input, and Assistant itself, require a data connection to be on at all times. The Hindi language version is not slower or faster than the English language version. However, like all Chatbots and digital assistants, there might occasional delays of varying length for questions. This is normal. Although Assistant in Hindi may stumble at times, the experience is overall a good one, and makes powerful AI technologies available to more people, in a more familiar language. Allo is available for free on the Play Store and the App Store. We cannot wait for support in Bambaiya Hindi and Hinglish, with support for colloquialisms and slang.