Google has long had a thing for voice search, but until now, the only language it fully supported was English. Even though voice search itself is available for a few dozen languages, the only language Google could respond in with spoken answers was always English. That’s changing today. Google just announced that its Search app for iOS and Android can now speak out answers in French, German and Japanese.
Unsurprisingly, these are also languages Google’s Knowledge Graph supports. To answer these questions, after all, Google needs to be able to understand their intent (or at least have a high confidence that it does). Chances are then, that after this initial roll-out, Google will also target Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Italian, all of which are supported by Knowledge Graph.
If you speak German, French or Japanese, you can now easily try this new feature on your mobile phone. Just ask it “Wo bekomme ich Kaffee in München?” and it will happily show you coffee shops in Munich.
For now, this is only available on mobile, but given that Google has started to build voice support into virtually all of its services, chances are that it will also bring it to the web very soon.
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