With the new update announced by Amazon today, Alexa is gaining the ability to do direct translation between English and Spanish, German, French, Hindi, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. The update was added in November with Alexa’s expanded multilingual capabilities, which will translate the assistant into a non-English speaker and translator on US devices.
You can start a direct translation with a voice command like “Alexa, translate to Spanish”. Alexa reads a barrel to indicate that you can start talking to your partner, then translate your conversations directly, and display a live transcript on the screen of Echo Show devices. Amazon finds it useful to talk to friends and family who are visiting from abroad, or through the Alexa for Hospitality site, in the hotel setting.
In support of the new talent, Amazon says it has modified Alexa to better handle natural pauses in conversations, thanks to changes in Alexa’s tolerance for sentencing results.
Although we are not able to provide a complete test of Alexa’s live translation, the capability is very similar to Google Assistant’s translator mode, which was first announced in 2019. Our first translator mode was tough, but initially, Google tried to provide similar capabilities for displaying live transcript on devices like NestHub and to handle 27 different languages than Alexa currently supports. Whether Alexa can be more accurate and ultimately support more languages seems to be where direct translation from the Google presentation can be very different.
Amazon claims that the Alexa Live translation is now available on Echo devices in the United States.