Google Assistant, the popular virtual assistant of the Mountain View giant, according to official statements, should be officially available in as many as 30 languages and in over 80 countries, but perhaps the reality is a bit different so the company has intervened to make things clearer.
The 2019 edition of the Google I/O conference is now behind us, but it obviously left us with an enormous amount of news and announcements. Among the great protagonists of the Google conference dedicated to developers is the assistant, the virtual assistant of Google is in strong ascent and, thanks to the epochal novelties announced during the opening keynote, will make a very important generational leap in terms of speed as well as useful responses for individual users.
During the same inaugural conference of the event, Scott Huffman of Google had talked about the growth of Assistant and on its progressive expansion all over the world, speaking of service availability for over a billion devices, in over 30 languages and 80 Countries scattered around the globe. These are certainly impressive numbers, although Google has probably approximated them, given that in many countries it seems to be still in the Beta phase.
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Before we look at the map, I need to point out that Google ties country availability to languages, so even though we can all, in any country activate the Assistant in English, or French, or German, or any other language that’s selectable from its settings, the company doesn’t count that as a worldwide rollout.
Looking at the map, we can see obvious country/language combos where we already know Assistant has launched, even if in open beta: USA, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, many European countries, Russia, Turkey, the KSA, Egypt, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, China, Australia, etc… But there are also some weird outliers we had never even seen mentioned in the same breath as Assistant.
Among them are a few European countries like Finland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, and Moldova; as well as some Arab countries like the UAE, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco; and some in central and southern Africa like South Africa, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and more.
It’s not clear what makes Assistant “available” in these countries. We’ve seen private betas spread in Turkey, KSA, Poland, and a few other countries before public release, so is it a case that these closed tests are also occurring elsewhere? Or does the official language of a country being French, for example, mean that it has Assistant already, and if so, why aren’t Madagascar or Mali colored? Or could it be a mix of both factors at play?
