Google has been broadening the footprint of its translation service over the last few years, and it appears the latest expansion is ready to go.
Interpreter Mode, revealed last month at CES, lets your Google Assistant device – were talking Google Home, and other smart displays – listen to your conversation and translate the languages being spoken.
The demonstrations we’ve seen this far have all been on Home Hub – why not push the new device, after all? – and the idea of translation does lend itself to a display, but it’s also available on audio-only devices like Home Mini.
Interpreter Mode can officially support 26 languages – Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese – and it doesn’t need speakers to alternate between languages (it works it out).
Early reports say the feature may have loftier ambitions than its capabilities, working best with simple sentence structures rather than natural language. As I’m unfortunately limited to English and Bad English, I can’t really vouch for this – why not try it and let us know how it works out in the comments?
Still waiting for Google to bring the hands free calling on the Google Home and Google Mini that is available in the States and the UK.