Months after its initial announcement for Assistant, Google Home smart speakers recently bagged support for Hindi, which obviously is a big deal for India.
For this first step, you will have to use your smartphone to change the default language for Google Assistant. These steps are as under:
- Long-press the home button to bring up “Google Assistant” and tap the explore icon on the top right, followed by the ‘three dot’ icon to access the Settings menu via the overflow menu.
The Basic Stuff
I started off with some of the most familiar commands such as ‘Aaj bahar mausam kaisa hai?‘ or how’s the weather today and ‘Mujhe mere din ke baare mein batana‘ or tell me about my day and the speaker handled these in Hindi pretty easily. These are possibly the easiest queries you can ask the Google Assistant.
- Quiz Master
Next up, if you’ve got a Google Home speaker set up in your room, asking those burning trivia questions to Assistant is a common affair. I too did the same. I asked questions such as ‘Bharat ke Pradhan Mantri kaun hai?‘ and to test if it could keep up the conversation – just like it would in English. And then a few more questions about world leaders.
Quiz Master
However, I will warn you of one thing and do remember this while asking queries because the situation can turn out to be quite frustrating otherwise. Google Assistant in Hindi does not play well with Hinglish commands, i.e a mix of Hindi and English.
The Home speaker may respond to queries every so often but not always. This means if you ask Google Assistant ‘Mujhe office ka rasta dikhao’ (show me the way to the office) then it’s possible the Google Home won’t really be able to help you out. We expect Google to add mixed language support in the next few months, so we may see Hinglish added too.
Location & Directions
It was amusing to hear Assistant pronounce Italian names with an accent when we searched for places to eat at near us. But I found that the Google Assistant struggled when I asked to navigate to a specific location. I had to be very clear and deliberate in the way I asked the directions, especially to my work location.
While it did manage to show me the location for my workplace,, the Google Assistant in Hindi couldn’t help me navigate and tell me an ETA. This was quite frustrating for me.
Joke Nation 101
While the Google Assistant may not always elicit laughs with its ‘Dad jokes’ in English, Hindi is another matter, as we have seen right here.
This is where Assistant struggled in Hindi. Asking Google Home to play songs in Hindi was a hit and miss, which is a big disadvantage. Google Assistant faced no issue when I generally asked it to play the latest songs, or play songs by Indian artists and from Bollywood movies.
However, I was again disappointed to see that Hindi Google Assistant isn’t exactly able to keep up when even a little bit of English is brought into the mix. The Assistant had a lot of recognition issues when I asked it to play non-Hindi songs in Hindi.
I know, it sounds like the Google Home is appearing for the JEE exam and that’s what it felt like – but in a fun way. Once I was tired of volleying questions at Google Assistant, I brought in some help to check how well it handled different Hindi dialects.
And well, the Assistant did manage to fare quite well in this test and understand queries thrown at it by my colleagues, but there were times the speaker picked up a wrong word or didn’t respond back at all. The experience, however, was a laugh fest and the Assistant’s witticism in Hindi is what we loved the most.
You can surely see that Hindi support on Google Home is pretty well-rounded for now, and Google Assistant can handle most of the commands thrown at it. We still want to see it improve its recognition of mixed phrases. Ultimately though, English support is a ton better, more user-friendly, and intuitive.
