Google temporarily disabled Assistant multiple voice options for French in latest app update, says community manager

Google Assistant is probably one of the most fascinating innovations to come to us in the past decade. This virtual assistant understands your natural spoken language and with each iteration, gets a little more useful.

Today, the Assistant can do various tasks including operating your connected smart home devices, and even screen calls for you if you’re lucky enough to own a compatible device and live in a supported region.

Part of the experience of making a digital assistant truly personal is the ability to change its voice. Google Assistant does offer users the option to choose between a bunch of available voices.

Unfortunately, French users of the Google Assistant have noted that the option to change voices is missing, and as such, they are unable to select their preferred Assistant voice following the latest update to the Google app.

Those affected note that they now get the default female voice for their Google Assistant, even though they had set different preferences in previous builds of the Google app.

I had recently set French as the assistant language (I’m learning French and want to practice) and it was working fine, but since this can apparently affect assistant voice options I re-added English. But it won’t let me delete French (“None” isn’t an option when I open the French option, unlike the “English” option), so this fix won’t work.
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Basic troubleshooting doesn’t seem to yield any meaningful reprieve as the issue still persists. Even ensuring that the Google app settings do match the primary language doesn’t seem to fix it.

These reports have been brought to the attention of Google and in response, a community manager acknowledges this, noting that this feature has been disabled temporarily.

Thanks for reaching out and sorry for the inconvenience. At this time, we temporarily disabled the ability for you to choose between Google Assistant voice for French. We hope to have more voices available again in the future.
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It remains unclear why Google had to resort to doing this but French users of the Google Assistant can rest assured that this is only temporary as Google says it plans to have more voices again in the future.

We shall continue to keep an eye on this and update as and when we get more info so stay tuned to PiunikaWeb.

NOTE: We have these and many more Google stories in our dedicated Google section.

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