Comcast Announces Multilingual English-Spanish Support for Xfinity Voice Remote

Comcast added multilingual English and Spanish language support for its Xfinity X1 voice remote. The company processes more than 6 million Spanish-language commands monthly for customers who set their primary X1 language as Spanish, blogged Lead Engineer Raul Guerra Paredes Wednesday. “Unlike a personal electronic device like a phone, which can just be set to a mode where it only takes Spanish-language inputs and gives only Spanish responses, we knew that many of our Spanish-speaking customers lived in homes where both English and Spanish are spoken interchangeably.” Human speech patterns add complexity, Paredes said. Comcast engineers built technology so that when a customer makes a command, the voice platform queries English and Spanish voice databases simultaneously, he said. “We make manual changes to ensure we are capturing the most popular commands and train our [artificial intelligence] and machine learning algorithms to continuously improve." Some 23 million Xfinity customers have used voice remotes, issuing more than 3.5 billion voice commands in the first half of 2018. In both languages, requests for free movies top the list of voice commands, it said.