Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Make Alexa bilingual
Amazon’s Alexa doesn’t just know everything there is to know about the weather, general knowledge and what’s on your shopping list, Amazon’s digital assistant is also bilingual. Now before you get too excited thinking it might be able to speak Swedish or Chinese, her language base is a little limited.
Still, Alexa supports a range of mainstream languages, meaning you can get Alexa to speak both English and French, for example. Turn Alexa’s multilingual mode on and if you ask a question in French, it will respond in French, or ask in English and follow up by speaking in French, it will switch between the languages.
So if you want Alexa to say I love you in French (Je vous aime) on your Echo Dot for example, here’s how to turn on multilingual mode on Alexa and how to use it.
What you’ll need
- An Alexa-powered device
- The Alexa app
- Your smartphone or tablet
The short version
- Say “Alexa, speak English and French” – or choose a different language combination.
- Decide if you want to turn Alexa’s multilingual mode on across all your Alexa devices.
How to turn on Alexa’ multilingual mode
The short version was very short but there is a way to turn on Alexa’s multilingual mode on the Alexa app too, which we will go through in the longer step-by-step below.
The multilingual mode is perfect if you have people in your household that speak different languages, or perhaps you are trying to become better at speaking another language, whether that be French, Italian, Deutsch, Spanish or Portuguese. It’s also great if you just love the sound of different languages or want to familiarise yourself one.
It’s possible to choose which type of English you want Alexa to speak too, whether that’s American English, British English, Canadian English or Australian English, for example. Whatever reason you have for wanting Alexa to speak to you in two different languages, we have you covered.
Time needed: 5 minutes
- Open the Alexa app and head to Devices
First up, you’ll need to open up the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet and head to the Devices tab in the centre of the bottom of your screen.
- Select the Alexa device you want multilingual mode set on
If you followed the short version at all, you may have noticed that Alexa asks if you want to set the multilingual mode across all your Echo devices. If you don’t say yes, you can adjust them individually using these steps. You might want the Echo Dot in your children’s bedroom to speak English and Spanish, but the Echo Show in the kitchen to speak English and Italian for example.
- Find the Device Settings
Once you have selected the Echo device you want to enable multilingual mode on, you need to get to the devices settings. To do this, tap on the Settings cog in the top right corner.
- Scroll down to Languages
Alexa settings are plentiful so get your scrolling finger out as you’ll need to scroll down to pretty much the bottom of the device settings. You’ll see Language towards to the end, which you can tap on to choose a language to speak with Alexa.
- Choose the Language you want Alexa to speak
Once you’ve hit the Languages settings, you can choose the other language you want Alexa to speak. You can also choose for Alexa to speak just French or just Spanish for example, and ditch English entirely if you want. Once you have selected the language you want Alexa to speak, or the combination of languages, a tick will appear on the right.
You’ll need to press Sync at the top to force the change.
That’s it! Once you’ve completed all those steps, you will able to speak to Alexa in your language of choice and have it respond in the same language. You will also be able to ask a question in English, such as what the weather is like and follow up with a question in French for example, to which it will then reply in French.
FAQs
This depends on where you are based, and where your Alexa device is setup. If you are in the US or the UK, you get several options, including Deutsch, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Hindi.
Amazon first rolled out multilingual mode in 2019 but it has expanded significantly since then. It is available in a range of countries, including the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Mexico, Brazil and Japan.