Google announced today that its virtual assistant will now support two new languages — Spanish for users in the US, Mexico and Spain as well as Italian for those in Italy. These languages will be rolling out over the next few weeks, according to Google, and while initially they’ll only be available for Android, the company says iPhone support will be released later this year.
With these additions, Google Assistant now supports a total of eight languages — including English, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese and Korean — in 12 countries around the world. While that puts Google’s virtual assistant in line with Microsoft’s Cortana, which also supports eight languages, ahead of Amazon’s Alexa, which only supports German and a few versions of English, and ahead of Samsung’s Bixby, which supports just English and Korean, it’s still well behind Apple’s Siri. Apple’s assistant currently supports 20 languages — quite a few more than any of its counterparts.
In order to use the new Google Assistant languages with your Android phone, just be sure you’re running Android 6.0 or higher. They should be available in the specified regions in the coming weeks.