Google Home now supports Spanish

NelsonG · June 26, 2018

Google Home has learned Spanish. Google announced this morning that its smart speakers are now able to listen and respond to users’ voice commands in Spanish. The update may help the speakers gain more ground against Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo devices, not only in the U.S. where a number of people today speak Spanish as their native language, but also in other international markets.

Related to this, Google says its Google Home products, including the Home, Home Mini and Max, are available in Spanish in Mexico and Spain.

Though today Amazon Alexa devices have the most market share in the U.S., Google may have found Amazon’s Achilles heel by targeting language support to grow its own install base. While Amazon supports English, German and more recently, Japanese, Google has promised its smart assistant will support over 30 languages by year-end.

Those languages – or at least some of them – should roll out over time to Google Home speakers, too, as Google targets new markets with its smart devices.

Today, however, Google’s mobile Assistant speaks more languages than its speakers, which currently support English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, according to Google’s website, in addition to now, Spanish.

Google also said its Assistant will become multilingual, meaning users will be able to switch between two languages without having to change the settings. This support will initially be available in English, French and German, but it makes sense that Spanish would be a priority here, as well, though Google didn’t say today if that would be the case. (And presumably, the longer-term goal is to also make its smart devices, not just its mobile Assistant, capable of multilingual capabilities across languages.)

To change a Google Home’s language to Spanish, you’ll need to launch the Google Home app, select Preferences, then visit the Settings menu.

With Spanish enabled, you can ask Google Home about your day (“Ok Google, ¿cómo será mi día?”), the World Cup (“Ok Google, ¿cuándo juega México?”), listen to top songs (“Ok Google, reproducir mi lista de reproducción para hacer ejercicio”), adjust your thermostat (“Ok Google, sube la temperatura del termostato”) and more, as you can in other languages.