Nine of 10 smart speakers in the US are either from Amazon or Google

Strategy Analyitics conducted a new survey on smart speakers in the US in July and August and it revealed that 9 out of 10 smart speakers are either Amazon Alexa or Google Home devices. The results of that survey show that in the 50 million installed speaker market, the Echo and Google’s Home speaker occupy the top eight slots on a list of the ten most popular speaker models. The outlier is Apple’s HomePod, in the number nine spot, with a 4 percent market share.

Canada, a much smaller market, has seen the availability of Amazon, Google and even Apple's HomePod these past two years although there's no telling how well these devices are selling here. Google Home has been developed partly in Canada and has had the French Canadian language built-in since its inception. Amazon just unloaded new devices in the US and Canada.

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Google Assistant gets its own web app for list and notes

Aptly called List and Notes, this new web app appears to give Google Assistant a place to store any list- or note-taking you might want to do without having to rely on third-party apps. What about Google Keep Notes or Google Tasks? We’re not quite sure what Google is doing here either. But if you just want a barebones list- or note-taker, then there’s this. You can’t do much beyond adding titles and or making your lists or notes so if you already use the other Google apps, then you’re better off sticking with those. You also just have an option to mark off items or delete them entirely. Google hasn’t really announced this feature yet but it is already live if you want to try it out. It does allow for saving between devices, if that’s important but since it doesn’t sync with the aforementioned services, we are a bit confused as to why this exists in the first place. 

Source: 9to5Google  

Real-time Google Translate coming to all Google Assistant-enabled headphones

One of the nifty Google Pixel exclusives is coming to more Android devices. Google updated the support page for the Pixel Buds to say that the real-time translation, which was an exclusive for the Pixel Buds paired with a Google Pixel phone, is coming to all Google Assistant-enabled headphones and Android devices. According to Droid Life, the change doesn’t seem surprising as the LG Tone SE and the Type-C Pixel earbuds that come with the Pixel 3 both have support for the feature.

Right now, there aren’t a lot of Google Assistant-optimized headphones. But if you have the Pixel Buds, Bose Quiet Control 35 II, Sony WI-1000X, Sony WH-1000XM2, Sony WH-1000XM3 and a couple more models by JBL, you can try out to see if it works. Just say “Hey Google, help me speak X” and see if it responds.

Source: XDA-Developers

Google Assistant is now bilingual

At least when it comes to six specific languages. But that’s still an incredible feat for Google’s digital assistant. At the moment, no other voice assistant can’t support more than one language at a time. Google Now previously had bilingual support. But starting today, Google is rolling out globally the ability for Google Assistant to recognize two languages at once. It’s currently limited to English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Here are the instructions on how to enable the feature, once it’s available to you. And when it does come, theoretically it should work for Assistant on both your mobile devices and Google Home, possibly even third-party Assistant-powered speakers.

Source: Android Police