Google Assistant on KaiOS to receive support for seven Indian languages, actions

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tech2 News Staff Feb 25, 2019 18:19:38 IST

The Google Assistant may be just a couple of year old, but thanks to Google’s push the voice assistant is nearly on every Android device we see around us today. The next stop for Google appears to be feature phones.

Having invested $22 million into KaiOS Technologies, (a company that makes KaiOS for feature phones like the JioPhone, JioPhone 2 and the Nokia 8110 4G), Google is now adding support for more functions to the Google Assistant on feature phones with KaiOS.

Both the JioPhone and JioPhone 2 run on KaiOS. Image: KaiOS

As per a report by 9To5Google, the Google Assistant is soon being upgraded with ‘voice typing’, letting users dictate messages, web searches and everything that requires typing into a text box. KaiOS, an operating system which allows you to switch the native language of operation, now also has a version of the Google Assistant which supports multiple local languages.

To make this feature accessible to millions of Indians, Google is offering the Assistant in seven new Indian languages. Namely, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu. These seven languages join Marathi, which was added to the assistant last August.

That’s not all. The tech giant is also adding support for third-party actions to the Assistant. If you’ve ever called yourself an Uber, played a game or checked on the status of packages using the Google Assistant, you’ve essentially used actions. Actions are basically Google’s equivalent to skills for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.

All these features will be rolled out to devices running KaiOS in the next few months. As per the report, Google also plans to add all these new features to the Google Assistant on phones running Android Go.

Disclaimer: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.

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