Siri now speaks in Hindi

Siri started out speaking English only at launch and with iOS 5.1, Japanese support was rolled out. Late 2012 will bring Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Korean to Siri. Now however, Siri can talk to you in Hindi. This discovery was made by Kunal Kaul, who set up Siri to respond to questions in Hindi by setting up a proxy server. According to Mobigyaan, he says that Siri on his iPhone connects with his Google API server to respond to questions. Kaul has even shot a video and posted on YouTube with his results showing how Siri responds in Hindi. The interesting thing is, he asks Siri questions in English and the personal assistant responds in Hindi, so it seems Siri cannot understand Hindi, it can only translate a response from English to Hindi before it answers your question. However, Siri’s reponse is also transcribed to Hindi in the Devnagiri script, so it makes for a cool visual where the question is written out in English and the response is in Hindi.

Kunal says that there is still a lot of work he is doing to fully flesh out Siri in Hindi. Siri currently supports four languages; English (in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia), French (in France) and German (in Germany) and Japanese (in Japan). The iPhone 4S was available in Japan in October and it made sense to follow up that launch with Siri in the native language. Hindi hasn’t made the list of planned languages, yet. It would also be interesting if eventually Siri adds more regional language support, like Tamil and Bengali. Facebook mobile, in the mean time, has been made available in 8 Indian languages, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi, and of course, Hindi. The iPhone itself does not support Hindi as a language, yet, but a Hindi keyboard is available in the international keyboards part of the phone.

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If Kaul manages to find a way to open up Siri in Hindi to the rest of us, be sure to watch out for some more “Fun with Siri” and “That’s what she said” type videos. Click here to see how much fun we had with Siri, albeit in plain English. Would you want your mobile personal assistant to speak your native language? Which other languages would you like it to speak? Let us know in the comments section below.