How to make Alexa bilingual
If you learn how to make Alexa bilingual, people in your household can talk to you Echo device in two languages, effectively making the language assistant more inclusive and even a good teacher of a second language. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant both support multilingual settings, where you can have the device intelligently detect what language you speak and respond in the same language, a feature Siri has yet to adopt.
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With many people at home having at least one way to connect to Alexa, Google, or Siri, it’s only logical that smart voice assistants would adapt to sound more like the people who use them.
How to make Alexa bilingual
Alexa has the ability to listen and respond in English and other languages, or a combination of two languages. This feature is available on 3rd Generation Echo Speakers, 2nd Generation Echo Shows and the newer generations of both devices.
To access your device’s language settings, go to the Amazon Alexa app.
To make Alexa bilingual, you’ll need to access the device settings on the Echo device you want to change. This allows each Echo device in your home to be set up to communicate in a different language. For example, you can set an Echo Show in your kitchen to speak English and an Echo Dot in your office to speak two languages.
Find and select the Echo device whose language you want to change from the list of available devices.
On your selected Echo, tap the gear icon in the top right of your screen to access the settings for that specific device.
In Settings, scroll down until you find Language and select it.
Find the language setting you want your Alexa to have. Whether you want a monolingual or a bilingual setting, you only have to make one choice. Alexa languages are available in individual options or as a set of two languages. This means you can choose English or English/Italian, but there is always a choice.
Alexa should be bilingual within minutes of setup. Since the voice assistant understands both languages, it will respond in any language, depending on which language the request was made in.
FAQ
Does Alexa understand Spanglish?
Alexa has at least some understanding of “Spanglish,” a combination of English and Spanish that allows speakers to alternate words within a sentence in one language or the other. In my experience, Alexa understood all of my family’s requests on Spanglish, as did the experience of other users. However, we obviously didn’t ask everything under the sun on Spanglish, but the things we asked worked.
Why can’t I switch Alexa to bilingual in the app’s global settings?
If you change the Alexa language for an Echo device, you must do so specifically in that device’s settings, not in the general settings of the Alexa app. It’s a little tedious, but it makes it so that you can set different languages for different Echos in your home.