Introductory: Google Voice Assistant is starting to understand and speak Hebrew
An eccentric test shows that Google Assistant now knows how to read web pages and messages in Hebrew, and is also able to answer questions in Hebrew in a way that isn’t bad at all. Are we about to officially launch in Israel?
Will Google Assistant finally reach Israel and Hebrew-speaking users? In recent days, we’ve had reports from a number of geeky readers that Google’s voice assistant has started reading messages in Hebrew, but from a slightly more thorough examination, it appears that not only is this true, but more Assistant features now support Hebrew.
Ask the maid to read your last messages
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time Google has introduced Hebrew support for text reading. Inform us in 2018 You know the assistant was also able to read a text in Hebrew (and simply stopped ignoring it elegantly every time), but it did so at the time in a way that was really poor and unusable. However, since then we have seen almost no progress. Now, you can try telling Google to ‘read my latest messages’ or ‘read my latest whatsapp messages’ and if it is in Hebrew, it will read simply nicely.
In an exclusive interview with Legitimate at CES 2020, Israeli engineers revealed to us from Google The real problem with launching the assistant in Hebrew is the ability to understand and read text without punctuation. At the time they told us, “We have researchers working on this problem and using machine learning to build proper algorithms. Some words are sometimes associated with other words and different contexts. Grammar is not enough, and one must also understand other unnumbered words as well. This is a very complex problem.” It does not allow writing simple laws.” Now, it looks like they’ve at least crossed that hurdle.
The page reading feature developed in Israel supports the full Hebrew language
Screenshot: Gictic
The same Israeli engineers at the show introduced the assistant’s new feature that allows web pages to be read aloud, while successfully ignoring image descriptions, menus, article publication dates, advertisements and other distractions that might significantly interfere with listening to articles. At the time, the feature was able to read ready-made articles in Hebrew, but with English subtitles.
But now, this reading feature fully supports the Hebrew language. Just try it here Swipe the Google Assistant at the bottom of the screen or say “Hey Google” and say “Read it” or “Read this page”. Google Assistant will start reading the page in impressive Hebrew, but not without errors (like calling Legitimate “Giktiim”, the restaurant name and delivery reviews section we’ve always wanted to launch).
By clicking on the three-dot button that appears at the top of the screen, you can also select “Read Aloud” and here 4 different Hebrew sounds will be displayed, while you can hear them reading to you in pure Hebrew “These are the sounds to choose from for reading web pages.” If You like the sound and you want me to keep using it, stop here.” Google currently offers two female nature voices and two male voices. Coincidence. All of this worked in my test without porting the interface of my device (Galaxy S21 Ultra) to Hebrew.
Assistant works almost completely in Chromecast
A little over a year ago, there were reports that users were able to access the assistant interface in Hebrew, and even type questions in Hebrew and get answers, but since then we haven’t seen any progress, and we certainly haven’t noticed any response to answers in Hebrew, which is The biggest challenge for the Israeli Google team. However, after I was able to get Read Aloud to work in Hebrew, I immediately switched to my Chromecast, which supports the latest version of Google TV, and switched the interface language to Hebrew (the wrong language for the interface, but that’s another topic of conversation). I pressed the assistant button on the remote control and asked her, “How’s the weather?” At the beginning of the sentence, I started helping to write what I thought I heard in English as usual, but after a few seconds I converted the text to Hebrew, and it showed me the result in Hebrew, with a correct audio prompt and clean Hebrew.
The other questions I’ve tried also manage to give good answers in Hebrew, so it definitely looks like Google has made a lot of progress here. However, when I tried to enter the language settings of the assistant on my smartphone, the option to switch its language to Hebrew didn’t appear at all, and my Google Home/Nest Hub devices couldn’t decode my Hebrew, so we might not be able to decode my speech With that, you’ll see a full launch of The Assistant, but only a partial launch of some of its features.
good old age
He was born with a joystick in his hand. He has a lot of tools and very little free time to play with them all. Unexplained hammer holder for calibrating device batteries. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it a lot
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