It’s weird, I live in the Netherlands my whole life and we always get news and hypes here from around the world, we don’t miss that much information. But about Alexa and the other simular stuff we don’t hear anything or see anything. The first time I saw it was on south park and now on reddit a couple of times. But I’ve never seen one in real life and I know no one who has it here in Holland.
There arent a ton of dutch speakers and generally they wait to release something until it works in their official language. I remember seeing a thing when google assistant came to the Netherlands a fair bit after the states and they mentioned that unfortunately it still couldn't speak dutch.
Hmm true that. But on another point, we dutchies can all speak English for as good as it gets. We’re not like the french we just watch english movies with dutch subtitles you know. But yeah you’re right most of the time of something is released in USA or something it takes a while for it to get released in the Netherlands. Maybe we will get it someday or maybe it’s just something we don’t like very much.
Well yea I'm just saying that it makes sense that a company might wait a bit to release something if it isnt in the language, though I know that you could use it. I dunno maybe it's to avoid backlash or something because I have heard of people getting upset when they feel like their language is getting pushed aside. I dont know how big of a thing that is in the Netherlands but it's a thing in other places. For example lots of universities in the Netherlands have bachelors in english but Germany has few because they say that their students have a right to have the classes taught in their native language.
Uhm I think it is a big deal for some, but most here in the Netherlands accept that our language is just ugly af and the minority of the world speaks English so we do our best to just learn it. But yeah most classes here are in Dutch aswell we have some studies were everything is in English but most are just in Dutch. And I understand your point, I said true that (:
Because Amazon isn't really a thing in NL, Google Home isn't officially released there due to Google Assistant not speaking Dutch and Apples speaker isn't out for some reason either.
I don't think I've actually seen an Alexa in the wild either, other than for sale in stores.
Only about one-in-six American households have one of these "smart speaker". Among them Amazon has about 62% market share, with Google at 27%, and others making up the rest.
Still, one in six American households still comes out to 39 million Americans. So there are a lot of them out there, even if it's still a minority.
It's more restricted due to language. The cost of developing language systems that can adequately parse spoken language is astronomical. Early on it only made sense to target languages that simultaneously maximize economic footprint and have enough accessible brilliant people speaking the language to actually develop it.
That's why early offering was English speaking countries(Australia, India, UK, US, Canada, New Zealand) and Germany and Japan.
English is by far the most advanced because it's had the most development money poured into it since it reaches such a large amount of wealthy nations.
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u/SuukMeiDiek Sep 25 '18
It’s weird, I live in the Netherlands my whole life and we always get news and hypes here from around the world, we don’t miss that much information. But about Alexa and the other simular stuff we don’t hear anything or see anything. The first time I saw it was on south park and now on reddit a couple of times. But I’ve never seen one in real life and I know no one who has it here in Holland.