Google voice search, a highly popular feature, has added more new features to its mobile application. The app will not support more Indian languages, Google has announced.
Google voice search, a highly popular feature, has added more new features to its mobile application. The app will now support more Indian languages, Google has announced. The search giant has added Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu to this list. Altogether, Google Voice Search will now support eight more Indian languages. The new languages support feature is a part of the Gboard app on Android and the Google App too. Native speakers of these languages will now be able to give voice queries in these, instead of just English or Hindi.
If you wish to use a new language, you will have to go the 'settings' in the Google Search app, and select the language in Voice settings menu. On Gboard, users can choose the language in the Settings after installing the app on their phone. Once that is done, a user can just type in the microphone symbol and start speaking. Google is also rolling out Voice search support for Indian languages on its iOS app.
Google says it worked with native language speakers in order to collect the speech samples. This process helped train Google's machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages. The company says relying on actual sample also improved the accuracy of the search. It adds that voice search will get better with time, once more users take to it and the machine learning systems will consequently learn more.
With mobile driving search across the world, Voice Search is one aspect which will continue to grow. Speakers from Google, Amazon, even Apple all rely on Voice Search, and Google has been at the forefront of pushing this.
Voice search being extended to other Indian languages is not surprising at all, given how Android dominates the Indian smartphone. Google expects the next wave of users coming online in India will be mostly native language speakers, rather than English speakers. Thus it needs to make sure that its core products are ready for these users.