Voice Assistants Have a Plurilingualism Problem

Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) using speech interfaces have historically been limited to monolingual use in pre-selected languages. Although recent developments in some IPAs have allowed for increased multilingual flexibility, the plurilingual competence – ability to utilise more than one language in the frame of a single interaction – of state-of-the-art IPAs still falls short. This is demonstrated in a pilot study, where two widely used IPAs are shown to consistently fail in plurilingual interactions across 3 core tasks. This lack of plurilingual competence makes certain IPA functions virtually unusable in various contexts for users who are not native speakers of the official language(s) where they are located, and also speaks to wider problems in the treatment of multilingual use of IPAs by developers. Addressing these issues will not only make IPAs with speech interfaces considerably more functional for a large demographic of current and potential IPA users, but also enable new applications for IPAs in contexts such as self-regulated language learning.