Google Assistant Coming to SA!

Google’s voice-operated Assistant technology and accompanying devices have been picking up some serious momentum over the past couple months, and it’s now confirmed that South Africa will be among the countries in Google’s Assistant expansion plans going forward.

The news was spotted by by Dutch journalist Elger van der Wel (and picked up by Gearburn) at the Digital News Initiative Summit, where Google showed a slideshow revealing that the virtual assistant is officially going to be released in several other countries, one of which was South Africa (also including Saudi Arabia, Italy, Japan, and Russia).

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 (@elger) February 15, 2018

Google Assistant is essentially the Android version of Apple’s Siri: voice-powered and interactive, allowing hardware adjustment, internet searching, and event scheduling on the active device simply through natural voice commands. While it’s already possible to get the app in South Africa without too many obstacles, the official release does mean it’s possible we could see dedicated hardware (such as Google Home) also being released in South Africa.

Assistant can also use a device’s camera to gain real world information and identify objects, opening up a wide variety of potential applications. Amazon offers a similar hardware and software combo called the Echo, which has already rolled out into more countries than Assistant has and might be part of the reason why Google is accelerating their own rollout.

Having voice-activated hardware that can perform almost all smart-device functions through voice commands is quite a significant development, especially as more and more functionality in the proprietary hardware is added. Considering how rapidly the technology is developing, we might not be far away from low-cost technological integration for entire households, all controlled with a few words aimed at your smart-phone or smart device!