Will it speak my language?

Short answer: probably, and you can check in about a minute.

The longer answer is that “supports a language” is four separate questions, and they have different answers. A single number would be a comfortable lie, so here is what actually decides it.

What Decides It

The part	Who provides it	What to check
Wake word	Thalovant	English only today — the phrase is “Hey Jarvis”.
Hearing you	Your device	Whether your phone or speaker has speech recognition for the language.
Understanding you	The hub’s skills	Whether the skills you want have that locale.
Answering aloud	Your device	Whether it has a voice for that language.

The Wake Word Is The Exception

Every client listens for “Hey Jarvis”, and only that. The model is small, runs on the device, and ships in one language. If you speak to it in Portuguese after that, it will do its best — but the phrase that wakes it stays English.

That’s the one part you can’t change today.

Hearing And Speaking Belong To Your Device

On the phone, Thalovant asks Android to turn speech into text and to speak the answer, so the languages available are the ones your phone has. The app prefers your phone’s offline recognition, and falls back to its online recogniser only when the language has no local model — see Where your voice goes.

The app’s own screens are translated into 30 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

On a speaker or a computer, Thalovant Voice uses whichever speech plugins are installed on that machine. Both recognition and the voice are pluggable, so the answer is whatever you configured.

Understanding You Belongs To The Skills

A hub answers through skills, and each skill carries its own phrasings and replies per language. A skill translated into your language understands you in it; one that isn’t, won’t — even on a hub set to that language.

Set the hub’s language in Runtime, and add secondary languages when a hub serves more than one.

Note

A hub can serve two languages at once, but the language follows the conversation rather than the sentence. Say a French sentence in an English session and the session is still English.

Check Before You Commit

1. Set the hub’s language. Runtime, on the hub you will actually use.
2. Set the client’s language too. In the app, Settings → Language.
3. Ask it something simple out loud — the time, or the date. That exercises recognition, a skill, and the voice in one sentence.
4. Ask what it can do. What can I ask? lists the sentences this hub understands, in the language it’s set to. If the list comes back in the wrong language, the skills are the gap, not your device.

If step 3 gives you an answer out loud in your language, everything after that is skill coverage, which you can add to.

If It Answers In The Wrong Language

Check the client first, then the hub — they can disagree, and the client is the easier one to see. Something is wrong has the full sequence.

Your Language Is Ready When

• the hub’s runtime language is the one you want;
• the client is set to the same language;
• a simple spoken question comes back aloud, in that language;
• the intent list for that hub reads in your language;
• the skills you actually care about appear in that list.