You won't need to download an app on Android because Assistant is baked into the operating system, but you will need to download the Google Assistant app if you have an iPhone. With this update, it's finally making its way to smartphones. It's called Interpreter Mode in Google Assistant, and it isn't new per se-the company demonstrated it almost a year ago, at CES 2019-but the feature was until now relegated to smart speakers and smart displays, like the Google Home and Nest Hub Max.
The company has updated Google Assistant so that it supports translating languages in real time. Now, Google is making it possible to have spoken conversations across language barriers without needing to download an app at all. Translation apps like Google Translate or Microsoft Translator are familiar to world travelers. It wasn't perfect, and he had to repeat himself a few times, but what flowed out was a proper conversation-one that wouldn't have been so easily possible a decade ago. That's when I whipped out Google Translate, and his eyes lit up as my phone conveyed his questions better than I ever could. Cue a kludgy back and forth, with both of us having a hard time really understanding one another. But his phrasing was awkward because English wasn't his native tongue. When I hopped into a cab in Barcelona last year, my taxi driver began asking me questions-you know, small talk.
