Google Assistant was Google's big launch for this year, a new assistant that would rival that of Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, and that would take Google Now a step further. It was going to change even what our home is, being able to include an intelligent assistant at home. And yes, it will be like that, but not in Spanish, at least from launch. Now we can begin to confirm what we feared, that it will not arrive so soon in Spanish.
How do we know?
This new information, which of course cannot be considered definitive, has been known after unzipping the APK file of the latest version of the Google search application, in which the languages in which it would be available already appear, from a start, Google Assistant. If our smartphone, tablet, or our Google account is not associated with one of these main languages, we would be given a choice of one of the two main languages in which it will be available. Obviously, one of them will be English. The other, somewhat surprisingly, will be German.
What is Google Assistant?
For those who still did not know this assistant, Google Assistant was going to be a new intelligent Google platform that was going to be able to answer the questions and the approaches that we made in a natural language, and not with specific and very specific commands. . That way we could even have a conversation with said assistant. That is, at least, the goal that Google has. Google Assistant would arrive integrated in smartphones, and also in Google Home, a new device with which we could turn our entire house into an intelligence capable of answering our questions.
Why not in Spanish?
When we talked about Google Assistant, we already said that one of the things we feared was that the new service would not arrive in Spanish, since one of the characteristics of this service is that it must be able to recognize what we are saying, and after give an answer that is also in natural language. In general, Spanish is a complicated language. In addition to having a myriad of different nuances, the fact that it is the second most widely spoken language in the world, with so many different people and cultures speaking it, and that so many variants of the same words and verbs have emerged, greatly complicates launching a service in our language. And it is not the same to launch a mobile interface or an app in Spanish, which all Spanish-speakers can understand, than to create a supposed intelligence that is capable of understanding all the ways of speaking of all Spanish-speakers. While anyone in South America could perfectly interpret the word "Car" in an app translated into Spanish, or a Spanish person could interpret the word "Carro" in an app translated into a more Latin Spanish, for an artificial intelligence that cannot even being called smart all these nuances are much more complex.
How long could it take?
Continuing with the above, it is difficult to analyze how long it could take for the new Google service to arrive. Although I do not know if it is the correct question. Perhaps the question is not how long it might take to arrive, but how long it would take for a quality version to arrive. That is, not just a Google Assistant, but a Google Assistant that really understands us and has no errors. That in the end it does not become a useless service that is constantly telling us that it has not understood us correctly. At the moment, English and German seem like the first two languages that Google Assistant will arrive in. And in this case, curiously, the fewer users there are in that language, the easier it is to launch a service that is functional and does not give errors. Spanish, Chinese and French pose problems due to the multicultural nature of the language, but it is clear that if they want it to be a service used all over the world, they will have to reach these user groups sooner or later.