Google Assistant gets a second voice in nine countries

Even though Google Assistant offers multiple voices, only the U.S. had the feature in English. That changes today, when Google announced a new Assistant voice for nine other countries.

Today’s announcement means the nine countries now have a second Assistant voice option to pick from. The nine supported languages include the following, with each language corresponding to the country:

• English in the U.K.
• English in India
• French
• German
• Japanese
• Dutch
• Norwegian
• Korean
• Italian

Google claimed the new voices should sound natural and feature good pacing and pitch, thanks to DeepMind’s WaveNet technology. The company also claimed the voices will sound like a native speaker and be able to understand users’ accents, cultural references, the way they talk, and more.

Also read: Google Assistant will work on Chromebooks in these countries

Google also announced today voices will be displayed by color instead of gender. With this change also comes a Google experiment, which gives you a 50% percent chance of getting the “red” or “orange” voice as the default if you live in one of the countries getting a new voice.

The second Assistant voice is rolling out in the U.K., India, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, and Italy.