A leaked image from a slideshow presentation suggests Google has big plans for Assistant in 2018.
If the image is to be believed, Assistant will be in 52 countries and 17 more languages by the end of the year.
The leak should be taken with a large amount of salt, as some details are suspect.
Right now, Google Assistant is only available in eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese. Likewise, the Google Home hardware is only officially available in seven countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Everyone else? You’re out of luck.
It seems that could change sometime this year. According to an image leaked from a presentation at the Digital News Initiative in Amsterdam, Google plans to make Assistant available in 17 more languages across a total of 52 countries. That’s more than a 200% increase on both fronts.
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Now, this doesn’t come directly from Google and therefore should be taken with several pounds of salt. The presentation at the DNI conference featured a map, depicted in the tweet below. As you can see, the map says nothing about Google, Google Assistant, or Google Home. It’s a map of the world with some parts white and some parts blue, and a title that just says, “More Locales in 2018.”
Voor het eerst officieel uitgesproken door Google: Google Assistent komt dit jaar naar Nederland (we zijn blauw op de kaart!) #dnisummit #dni2018 pic.twitter.com/fYyU12FWpD — Elger van der Wel (
The person who tweeted the map is a journalist from the Netherlands who was in attendance at the conference. His caption under the graph roughly translates to, “The first official announcement by Google: Google Assistant is coming to the Netherlands this year (we are blue on the map!)” That may seem like pretty solid evidence, but the other slides he tweeted out from the conference have nothing to do with Google Assistant, so it seems strange that Google would throw that in there.
If true though, this would be a huge boon for people outside of Google’s current list of Assistant-friendly countries, and represent yet another massive push by the company to get Assistant and related Home products into as many hands as possible. But whether this will all happen this year at this fast of a pace is exceptionally suspect for right now.