Google is priding itself for its impressive machine-learning capabilities, particularly when it comes to breaking down and optimizing large models enough to run them locally on phones. The newGoogle Pixel 8 and 8 Proare chock-filled with new features in this field. The one that stood out to me immediately was the addition of advanced local voice dictation for multilinguals, a feature that was previously restricted to single languages on the Pixel 6 and 7.
As someone who constantly switches between German and English, often enough mid-sentence when I talk to my wife, I knew I just had to get my hands on this and try it for myself. While the new capabilities are impressive and better than what I’ve seen on other phones, there is still a long road ahead for truly great multilingual voice input.
Before we dive in, a quick refresher on voice typing on Pixel phones: Google first introduced its more advanced voice dictation,branded as “Assistant voice typing,”with the Google Pixel 6 and Android 12 back in 2021. Rather than sending your audio to Google servers to do the heavy lifting, as is the case with Google’s previous voice dictation method, the audio is analyzed and transcribed locally on your phone. It’s the same magic that turns yourGoogle Recorderaudio into serviceable text, and also what powers the auto-generated subtitles you can turn on Pixel phones.
If you’re multilingual like me, the solution isn’t ideal, though. When you use a Gboard keyboard with multiple languages, like German and English in my case, voice dictation would fall back to the old method, requiring an active internet connection for best results. (There is a local fallback when you’re in airplane mode or have poor connectivity, but it’s far more prone to error than other methods.)
you’re able to tell which voice typing method is used by the colors of the microphone button: When Assistant voice typing is active, you will see the signature quad-color Assistant bar depicted within the microphone icon, pulsing as you speak. When it’s not, you’ll see a much simpler single-color animation.
Testing the new multilingual Assistant voice typing
To get a rough idea of multilingual typing on the Pixel 8 compares to others, I dug through some of my bilingual chat messages to find samples that I could challenge voice typing with, slightly altering some of them for clarity. I then set up a Google Pixel 8 with the new multilingual Assistant tying, aGoogle Pixel 7 Prowith the old multilingual typing, and also an Apple iPhone 13 to see how good or bad things are on the other side of the fence.
While my method is by no means scientific, I still wanted to get some sense of comparability, so I used a single voice prompt for all three devices, turning the microphone on simultaneously. That way, inconsistencies between the devices can’t be traced back to slightly different pronunciations or volume across the experiment — all three phones work with the same input.
you may either watch the video of the process above or dig straight through the transcriptions in the table below.
Looking at the broader picture, it’s clear that the Pixel 8 wins this comparison, if only by a small margin. None of the phones got everything right, but the Pixel 8 was the one that most consistently recognized language switches and respected them, as long as it didn’t randomly switch keyboards (more on that in a bit).
At the same time, the Pixel 7 Pro with its older voice typing method comes surprisingly close, and it mostly only fails when it comes to recognizing the ad-hoc language switching. This is particularly noticeable in examples 1 and 5, where the English is mostly impeccable, but the German parts are English gibberish.
Another thing to like about the Pixel 8’s voice typing is that it adds punctuation for you, something that the older model still misses. I’d argue that this is a must-have when it comes to voice typing, since you will always have to go back and manually edit your transcript before sending it otherwise (or you just don’t care if other people will understand you).
Let’s not even mention the iPhone — it’s horribly bad in comparison to both Pixel phones, and I can’t recommend anyone even attempting to go multilingual on it. I don’t get how some of these errors even arise, with the iPhone fully misspelling some words (“lookingat” in 7) and inventing others (“Eiting” in 5).
Erratic keyboard layout switching
A bigger issue with the Pixel 8’s new dictation method is that when I’m using multilingual voice typing, Gboard sometimes decides to arbitrarily switch between my on-screen keyboards. With sentence number 3 in particular, Assistant voice typing would consistently switch from my selected German/English keyboard to my dedicated English keyboard, completely ignoring my voice input following the first half of the sentence. I repeated this sentence multiple times and reliably ran into this behavior.
This erratic keyboard switching is also the reason why I repeated one of the sentences in the video for the Pixel 8, as I didn’t immediately notice that the phone jumped to my English-only keyboard.
I haven’t seen this kind of behavior on any of my phones before, so it looks like it’s a new feature. Upon further testing, I can confirm that Gboard will automatically switch its keyboard layout to whatever language you’re predominantly using at a time. This may sound convenient on the surface, but I don’t think it is.
A big problem with this is that it means you can’t force Gboard to stick listening to one language only anymore. Even when you have one keyboard specifically set upwithoutmultilingual typing, this setting won’t be respected by Assistant voice typing. For people who have a thick accent, this can lead to problems with Assistant potentially misinterpreting German-sounding English as German (in my case). Voice typing is a big reason why I have a dedicated English-only keyboard that doesn’t understand German, and the Pixel 8 breaks this workflow.
This also has implications on a mixed use of voice typing and keyboard using. When a user chooses their dedicated English keyboard to start voice dictation, then software should respect this explicit selection and not just switch randomly without interaction. After all, the switch between keyboards also slightly changes button layout, with theGerman QWERTZ layoutdiffering a little from theAmerican QWERTY, which can be jarring when it happens without you noticing.
The erratic full keyboard switching behavior is the biggest remaining issue with multilingual Assistant voice typing for me. Beyond that, it’s the best bilingual experience I’ve had with voice typing so far. At the same time, just take look at the examples above. The Pixel 8 may be the most accurate of the bunch, but there are still obvious mistakes and things in its transcription that don’t make sense. It’s definitely a step in the right direction, though, especially consideringthe state of multilingual voice typing just three years ago.
As generative large language models mature, voice dictation might be an interesting use case for them. Once this kind of AI needs less energy and can work reliably and fast on phones, Gboard might just run your voice input through a Google Bard model to fix any remaining errors. Something like this is already in the works to help you fix your writing retroactively, withGboard’s Proofread AI helping you correct spelling and grammar in your messages. For voice typing, this step may need to be built right into the workflow in the future to make this kind of input truly seamless.
At the same time, Gboard pretty much nails multilingualactualtyping for me, naturally and predictably switching between each language’s autocorrection models. Gboard is likely the single best Google app I regularly use, and it rarely lets me down. Whenever I use my iPhone, I dearly miss the nearly impeccable autocorrection from Android phones, even after iOS 17’s big (and necessary) upgrades in this department. I can only hope that Google will keep innovating and stay a step ahead of the competition when it comes to input.
Google Pixel 8
If you want to experience the new multilingual Assistant voice typing, the Google Pixel 8 is your best bet right now. The feature will come to the Pixel 7 series later, too, but the Pixel 8 is still a substantial upgrade over last year’s phones, with a better processor, a perfect form factor, and a refined design.
Google Pixel 8 Pro
The Google Pixel 8 Pro is the more expensive route to go when you want Assistant voice typing in multiple languages, but it also offers more than its smaller brother: A bigger, brighter screen, a beefy camera setup, and some extra software goodies.
