A Look at the Number of Languages Popular Voice Assistant Services Support (venturebeat.com) 74
An anonymous reader shares a report: Contrary to popular Anglocentric belief, English isn't the world's most-spoken language by total number of native speakers -- nor is it the second. In fact, the West Germanic tongues rank third on the list, followed by Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, and Russian. (Mandarin and Spanish are first and second, respectively.) Surprisingly, Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana recognize only a relatively narrow slice of these.
Google Assistant: With the addition of more than 20 new languages in January, the Google Assistant took the crown among voice assistants in terms of the number of tongues it understands. It's now conversant in 30 languages in 80 countries, up from 8 languages and 14 countries in 2017.
Apple's Siri: Apple's Siri, which until January had Google Assistant beat in terms of sheer breadth of supported languages, comes in a close second. Currently, it supports 21 languages in 36 countries and dozens of dialects for Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Microsoft's Cortana: Cortana, which made its debut at Microsoft's Build developer conference in April 2013 and later came to Windows 10, headphones, smart speakers, Android, iOS, Xbox One, and even Alexa via a collaboration with Amazon, might not support as many languages as Google Assistant and Siri. Still, it has come a long way in six years.
Amazon's Alexa: Alexa might be available on over 150 products in 41 countries, but it understands the fewest languages of any voice assistant: English (Australia, Canada, India, UK, and US), French (Canada, France), German, Japanese (Japan), and Spanish (Mexico, Spain).
Samsung's Bixby: Samsung's Bixby -- the assistant built into the Seoul, South Korea company's flagship and midrange Galaxy smartphone series and forthcoming Galaxy Home smart speaker -- is available in 200 markets globally but only supports a handful of languages in those countries: English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.
Google Assistant: With the addition of more than 20 new languages in January, the Google Assistant took the crown among voice assistants in terms of the number of tongues it understands. It's now conversant in 30 languages in 80 countries, up from 8 languages and 14 countries in 2017.
Apple's Siri: Apple's Siri, which until January had Google Assistant beat in terms of sheer breadth of supported languages, comes in a close second. Currently, it supports 21 languages in 36 countries and dozens of dialects for Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Microsoft's Cortana: Cortana, which made its debut at Microsoft's Build developer conference in April 2013 and later came to Windows 10, headphones, smart speakers, Android, iOS, Xbox One, and even Alexa via a collaboration with Amazon, might not support as many languages as Google Assistant and Siri. Still, it has come a long way in six years.
Amazon's Alexa: Alexa might be available on over 150 products in 41 countries, but it understands the fewest languages of any voice assistant: English (Australia, Canada, India, UK, and US), French (Canada, France), German, Japanese (Japan), and Spanish (Mexico, Spain).
Samsung's Bixby: Samsung's Bixby -- the assistant built into the Seoul, South Korea company's flagship and midrange Galaxy smartphone series and forthcoming Galaxy Home smart speaker -- is available in 200 markets globally but only supports a handful of languages in those countries: English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.
Alternative title (Score:2)
"A Look at How Many Languages You Can Conveniently Submit Yourself to Corporate Surveillance in"
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Alexa (Score:1)
Since October 2018 Alexa supports Italian language ad well.
Bit of a Strawman (Score:5, Informative)
Contrary to popular Anglocentric belief, English isn't the world's most-spoken language by total number of native speakers
Correct, it simply has the most speakers, period.
It's an *Assistant* (Score:4, Informative)
The article speaks about *assistants*. Things supposed to be helping non-technical people (even if we /.ers know that the real purpose is to monetize private information).
Most of the people would probably prefer use their everyday language in which they the most fluent when speaking to their accessory, not a secondary language that they have some knowledge of (because it's a popular one in lots of fields) but that they don't use frequently every day.
That's even what the /. summary attempts to point out, yes some knowledge of English is frequent, but what people actually speak in everyday is completely different.
If Google, Apple and co want to have a chunk of the giant juicy Chinese market, they better sell a service that can be use in language that these people are fluent in (Mandarin. Cantonese, etc.) not some language that some fraction of the population had some lessons of back when they were teens, and never had any actually real-world experience of and have barely uttered a single word there of.
Imagine if your assistant could only speak Spanish / German / French / whatever other language you learned in high school and never spoke again. Would you be as eager to use it ?
That's why "native speaker" is much more relevant in the specific contact of TFA rather than "has some knowledge of English".
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Western companies are generally excluded from the Chinese market by The Great Firewall and state sanctioned discrimination. So, there is probably little incentive to spend precious resources Chinese consumers.
Furthermore the differences in English dialects are very small compared to e.g. Chinese and Arabic. So it may be a stretch to compare the numbers directly and furthermore not taking purchasing power into account.
Regarding the discussion of native versus foreign languages: We are in fact a huge proporti
Chinese market (Score:3)
Western companies are generally excluded from the Chinese market by The Great Firewall and state sanctioned discrimination. So, there is probably little incentive to spend precious resources Chinese consumers.
A) There are plenty of western companies doing business in China quite successfully. I've been there and seen them first hand. That said the Chinese government definitely favors the home team so to speak but perhaps not to the degree you've been led to believe. Doing business in China is challenging but not impossible for foreign companies.
B) There is LOTS of incentive to spend resources on Chinese customers. The sheer size of the market ensures that. The question is how much opportunity they are affor
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That would be one way to brush up on my Spanish/ German/ French before taking a trip. If I had one of these machines (I don't and won't), I might set it to use one of those languages, just for fun.
Better yet it should just carry on a conversation with me, on a topic of my choice in a language of my choice: checking in at the hotel, ordering at a restaurant, getting tickets for some tourist trap, asking directions...
I do have a feel for how hard that sort of thing is. For one, non-native speakers tend to p
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and is the most sought-after second language, and is the official language of the seas, and of the air... and is the language you code in (statements and commands of any mainstream language are english), etc, etc, etc, etc...
it is the year two thousand and nineteen, it's about time for english to be taught in every fucking school across the globe.
My cat codes too (Score:3)
and is the language you code in (statements and commands of any mainstream language are english)
Some of us (and not all of those are cats) do code in Perl, you insensitive clod !
(Now switching the keyboard back into punctuation mode, I've got some work to do).
Total Wealth of All Speakers (Score:5, Insightful)
These are probably more relevant facts than the total number of native speakers if you are making money by selling a product. This is undoubtedly why French, German, Italian and Japanese, which are the languages of the other G7 members, also feature prominantly. Given that the current state of voice recognition is that it doesn't work very well for supported languages it is hardly surprising that it has not been rolled out beyond those languages with the largest and most accessible economies.
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India and China are huge and rapidly developing markets. Someone is going to get in early and dominate them, and everyone wants to be that someone.
China has issues with foreign companies being banned because they refuse to censor. Microsoft and Apple operate there, but Google doesn't and it's created a huge opportunity for companies like Tencent and Huawei to develop their own assistants and language processing tech.
India is more open but hasn't developed the local talent to quite the extent that China has,
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Google's speech recognition is excellent. It supports multiple languages at the same time, so my wife or I can talk to it in English, Japanese or Chinese and it responds in the same. It does incredibly well with tricky things like place names too.
It's very handy when one of us can't remember the right word or phrase in our non-native languages. Just ask it "how do I say X in Japanese".
Re:Total Wealth of All Speakers (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I find all speech recognition absolute trash.
This applies to everything from Ford in-car recognition through to Siri, Alexa and the Google assistants.
You all have to stop speaking. Then you have to state clearly your phrase. Then, literally something like 20-30% of the time it's completely unable to recognise even in a clean-room environment.
Even if I speak perfectly to them, it's quicker just to type, every single time. Even if that means getting up, going to my phone, picking it up, signing into it, going into Google, and typing.
People laugh me off when I say this and then I watch them try three or four times and NOT NOTICE they are doing that. And that's with simple keyword-laden phrases in a clean-room sound environment ("Alexa, sing me a song" is the one most people go for).
That's before you even get CLOSE to speaking to a native speaker about things like Google Translate, etc. They will laugh you out of the room more often than not. They are pathetic at translation, beyond how to say hello, order a salmon or sing happy birthday. The tourist-phrases, they work because the listener is more forgiving of you. Individual words basically play "thesaurus" for you. You try and translate a business document and you'll be laughed out of the contract.
I used to live with an Italian and I sat in a room full of Italian relatives (not a million miles from English, and quite an easy language to parse by audio) for about an hour with a translate app and we gave up on audio about 10 minutes in. Even then the translations often gave spontaneous bursts of laughter on both sides.
People really overblow speech recognition. You're clean-rooming it, multiple-retrying it, conveniently ignoring it's mistakes and re-interpreting it without realising.
P.S. I'm native English, only speak English, only ever spoken English. I work in private schools, so my pronunciation can be made perfect in one flick of my brain. One sales guy suggested that teachers write their school reports via Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I laughed so hard I had to leave the room when I was told that. Guess what... despite dozens of trials of all kinds of software, nobody has ever done it, even for a single child, even for a single report, even for a single subject, despite the fact that we use Google Docs for everything (so teachers could happily dictate into a Google Doc)
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Reliability probably depends on a lot of different factors. The quality of the device you are talking to, the environment (even if it's a quiet room the acoustics can have a lot of reverberation etc.) and your accent.
One thing my wife has found is that she sometimes needs to speak a little more loudly with her phone. Not shouting, just making a little effort to project. My phone is fine, even in the car.
Not good at all (Score:2)
Google's speech recognition is excellent. It supports multiple languages at the same time
It has trouble understanding my English and I am English. French and German is just as bad but there it could be my non-native accent.
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Works very well in French as far as I can tell. Actually it even understood something spoken by a 4-year old that I did not understand myself. I laughed when I saw what it had understood. But I was floored when the kid's dad told me that it was indeed what the kid said.
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It's worth pointing out that English is the second most spoken language in the world and arguably the most widely spoken language since the only one with more speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is predominantly only spoken in one country.
English is still the most widely spoken language, Mandarin has 1.07 billion speakers whilst English has 1.12 billion.
The difference between them is that Mandarin has 908 million L1 (native) speakers and English has 378 million L1 speakers. What makes English the most widely spoken language is that there are 742 million L2 speakers. Spanish by comparsion has more L1 speakers, 442 million but only 70 million L2.
Ultimately English is going to remain the international language because Mandarin is far to
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It's worth pointing out that English is the second most spoken language in the world and arguably the most widely spoken language since the only one with more speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is predominantly only spoken in one country that has a less-than-open market.
English is actually the most spoken language in the world according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. There are more people in China than the total number of worldwide English speakers, but not everyone in China speaks Mandarin, with about 30% [bbc.com] of people in China unable to speak Mandarin (Cantonese and Hokkien are prominent dialects).
The original Slashdot summary is also incorrect that English as a native language is not in the top-8 languages. It's actually third [wikipedia.org]. This is obvious because the total population of the US, the
Samsung's Bixby does *not* support those languages (Score:2)
"Samsung's Bixby: Samsung's Bixby [...] only supports a handful of languages in those countries: English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Korean, and Spanish."
AFAIK, until recently, Bixby (the voice assistant) did not understand German, French, Italian or Spanish. This was quite a letdown for us european customers. Has this changed recently ?
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You've got that right.
I was particularly annoyed that in order to disable the Bixby button, I had to sign up for a Samsung account to get far enough into the app to turn it off in its settings. Even now it still pops up for reasons I haven't figured out.
Eliminating Bixby entirely is the number one reason I'm interested in rooting my phone. It's also the number one reason I'm interested in a non-Samsung phone for my next phone if my employer makes that an option.
No-one cares. (Score:1)
English is the language of winners.
The rest are the languages of developing world slime that don't have $2c to rub together, so no-one cares.
My company looked at expanding into India but decided against it as there's no money there.
yeah, yeah..before you start crapping on about GDP blah blah..again, who cares ?
They shit in the streets !
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Subtle anti-Microsoft slant (Score:2)
Read the summary very carefully. The ONLY company that doesn't get a list or a number of languages is Microsoft. How come?
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Oh look at the little AC who doesn't understand the psychology of writing news articles.
Slightly off-topic (Score:2)
Many of these assistants are, potentially, spying on you via "smart" speakers. There is a pretty good idea floating around called Alias:
https://github.com/bjoernkarma... [github.com]
To goal is the get control back from your smart assistants.
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To goal is the get control back from your smart assistants.
Just get rid of them, easy peasy.
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While I have no use for the assistants, and would rather shoot the computer that wants me to speak to it, I realize that this is a time related issue. That is, I'm still young enough to get by with knowing tech, can walk, and have most of my mental faculties. However, for the elderly, a good assistant could be of real use.
Not sure what happens when the mental faculties go...
Schmoe: Alexa, I'd like to order 50 gallons of ice cream this week.
Alexa: Sure thing, boss, I've your credit card on file, would you li
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Let's define our terms (Score:2)
How about this: English is probably the most widely-spoken language among people who have flush toilets and electricity. People who don't have these things probably have limited use for a smart phone, so ensuring that Siri, Cortana and Clippy speak the language of people who squat by the roadside to pinch a loaf isn't much of a priority.
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How about this: English is probably the most widely-spoken language among people who have flush toilets and electricity. People who don't have these things probably have limited use for a smart phone, so ensuring that Siri, Cortana and Clippy speak the language of people who squat by the roadside to pinch a loaf isn't much of a priority.
You might be surprised. Mobile phones are very popular in places where electricity is subject to frequent brown-outs, black-outs, etc. Some of the mobile smartphones biggest markets have been in countries where people never had computers or reliable electricity.
German? I disbelieve that. (Score:3)
Given that it's trivial for the average German to ensure not even another native speaker from another dialect group understands a single word they say, I highly doubt that Siri manages to speak all the hundreds of dialects available.
Try it. Learn German. Learn it really well. Then go into some small Bavarian town and ask some old person for directions. Then wonder whether you learned the right language or whether you're in the wrong country.
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Given that it's trivial for the average German to ensure not even another native speaker from another dialect group understands a single word they say, I highly doubt that Siri manages to speak all the hundreds of dialects available.
Try it. Learn German. Learn it really well. Then go into some small Bavarian town and ask some old person for directions. Then wonder whether you learned the right language or whether you're in the wrong country.
Yes... but they all understand high German and can speak in that dialect to you if they want to.
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True, but if I don't want someone to understand me while talking with my buddy, it's trivial to do so. Since Siri is mostly an eavesdropping device, it kinda fails at this in Germany.
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Ja wohl!
My wife and I were vacationing near Lindau-im-Bodensee, in Bavaria just north of Switzerland. I was feeling pretty good about my German (given the fact that I'd had only three semesters, and that 45 years ago); I could talk to the waitress, and understand her, in my German. She could even understand me, or at least she claimed to. Then she turned around and spoke to another customer, someone who was local. I caught not a word. It was German, but definitely not Hoch Deutsch.
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"by native speakers" (Score:2)
I don't know anyone who believes that. What people believe is it is the most widespread language because it is the international language and non-native speakers often learn it as a second language (Chinese has more speakers, but they're almost all Chinese natives).
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Fun trick with Alexa... (Score:2)
It might just be my British accent, but I discovered by accident that if I say "my legs ache" fast as one word, it triggers Alexa every single time. Try it out... see if you can trigger her with "my legs ache" too! :)
First time it happened I was feeling bad, and was telling my wife a list of maladies: "my legs ache, I have a fever and my head hurts"... Alexa, unprompted said rather ominously... "Goodbye".
Looked back and saw in the logs the entry and was able to track "My Legs Ache" as what prompted her...
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First time it happened I was feeling bad, and was telling my wife a list of maladies: "my legs ache, I have a fever and my head hurts"... Alexa, unprompted said rather ominously... "Goodbye".
Sounds like she thought your condition was worse than it was.
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An American GI is admitted to an Australian hospital during WWII. The nurse asks him, "Did you come in today?" Says he, "I hope not!"
Everybody should just learn English (Score:1)
How many of these are open source and trustworthy? (Score:2)
Going to have to wait for a non-internet connected device that's open source. Oh? That doesn't mesh with these companies business model? Then YOU are the product, and they're making you pay for the privilege of letting them sell you.