Smart watches are all the rage these days as major tech companies like Google and Apple have released smart watches with optimized software built specifically for watches. It should be obvious that with those tiny screens on the smart watches, the technology isn’t begging to be another screen to run your apps. Smart watches are an extension to your smart phone, and a device to get information with ease at best. And because using the tiny screen with your fingers isn’t a great experience, the Android Wear watches are mostly operated by voice. And that’s also the best thing about Android Wear watches. But Voice recognition technologies are still under development and not many languages are supported.
Among the supported languages by Google Voice, English is the most graduated with understand-ability for various accents across the world. If you live in a country like India where English is used as much as the native language (even more among the youth), then Google will working on understanding the Indian English accent first than bringing support for the native language, Hindi.
If you plan on purchasing an Android Wear watch and you’re not good with English, then you might want to re-consider. Sure, Android Wear is not only about voice, it has Google Now cards, a growing collection of apps and various services optimized for smart watches to make your life easier, but still Voice control is the essence of Android Wear watches, otherwise you’re just purchasing another screen to see notifications that also appear on your Android devices.
So, if English isn’t your first language then you might want to test your voice first with the voice operated Google Search app on your Android device. It comes pre-installed on most Android devices and if yours runs Android 4.2 or above versions of Android, you should also have the “Ok Google” feature on your device’s home screen. Test your English accent with the app and see if it understands you, also change the language to your native language from the app’s settings to test is it’s supported or how well is it recognized.
Below is the list of languages that Google Voice supports, if your native language isn’t listed here then Moto 360, G Watch or any other Android Wear watch won’t take commands in your native language. However, I’m pretty sure Google will be selling and marketing Android Wear watches only in regions where it supports either their English accents or their native language.
GOOGLE VOICE SUPPORTED LANGUAGES
The list below has been taken from this WikiPedia page. And most of these languages are only partially supported by Google Voice.
- Afrikaans since 2010
- Basque since 2012
- Bulgarian since 2012
- Catalan since 2012
- Arabic (7 dialects) since 2011
- Czech since 2010
- Dutch since 2010
- English (Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, US) since the 2008 launch
- Finnish since 2012
- French since 2010
- Galician since 2012
- German since 2010
- Hebrew since 2011
- Hungarian since 2012
- Icelandic since 2012
- Italian since 2010
- Indonesian since 2011
- Japanese since 2009
- Korean since 2010
- Latin
- Mandarin Chinese (Traditional Taiwan, Simplified China, Traditional Hong Kong) since 2009
- Malaysian since 2011
- Norwegian since 2012
- Polish since 2010
- Pig Latin since 1 April 2011 but it was actually added and not just because of April Fools’ Day, although it is not officially listed
- Portuguese (Brazilian; European since 2012)
- Romanian since 2012
- Russian since 2010
- Serbian since 2012
- Slovak since 2012
- Spanish (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, US, Uruguay, Venezuela) since 2010and Latin American Spanish since 2011
- Swedish since 2012
- Turkish since 2010
- Yue Chinese (Traditional Hong Kong) since 2010
- Zulu since 2010
