Google learns to speak French and German

“How many calories are there in a banana?”

From now on, you can speak such queries into a phone or tablet and receive a quick response — eighty-nine calories in English, quatre-vingt-neuf if you ask in French, or neunundachtzig kalorien in German. We’ve been on tour in recent weeks throughout Europe, from London to Paris and Hamburg, with our Google House, demonstrating our vision of the connected present. The star of the show was our most advanced Voice Search, which just has arrived in the UK, France and Germany.

In the kitchen, Voice Search can help you find just the right recipe — even if your hands are covered in flour. By talking to their smart device, our chefs in the Google House searched for recipes, asked for weight and temperature conversions, which we will speak right back, and even set a countdown timer on their device to remind them to take their lemon madeleines out of the oven.

Jamie and Ben from Sorted Food, YouTube’s largest cooking channel in Europe, showed us how Voice Search can help around the kitchen

We can also provide smart reminders, where you can asked to be notified when you're near the location for that particular task, such as “Remind me to pick up sugar next time I’m at Sainsburys.”

In the living room, voice can help you discover music, videos, photos, movies and other services, while the teen’s bedroom we showed how school kids could use use Voice Search to help with homework tasks — “Show me paintings by Picasso” pulls up a carousel of Pablo Picasso’s works right on the search page which can easily be scrolled through.

Google can help kids and adults alike with quick and easy answers

What makes the Voice Search extra-special is its ability to understand the context of a question. For example:

• Ask  “How old is David Beckham?” and then follow up with the question “And who is his wife?”, and Google knows you mean David Beckham’s wife.
• Ask “What is the weather like in Liverpool?,” you can follow-up with “How long does it take to drive there?”

This makes searching by voice like a real-life conversation. Fast and accurate voice recognition technology — available on Android and on the Google Search app on iPhone — enables us to understand exactly what you’re saying and provide speedy responses by tapping the microphone icon. For example, “Is British Airways flight 248 on time?”

The words appear as you speak, you get your answer immediately and—if it’s short and quick, like the status and departure time of your flight—we tell you the answer aloud.

By the time a guest was ready to leave Google House, he or she was encouraged to ask a simple question: “How do I get home?” We came up with the answer — and could even tell you when you need to leave depending on the traffic on your route.

Posted by Michael Valvo, Head of Product Communications, London