Google voice search now supports 8 new Indian languages

Google has announced that it is rolling out voice search in eight additional Indian languages. Besides Hindi, the new list of supported languages include Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. The new feature will be available on Gboard for Android as well as in Search through the Google app on Android and iOS.

“Using voice to dictate a message is not just convenient, but it is also up to three times faster than typing. The new language support will also enhance voice typing on Gboard, helping users to respond to emails on the go and send texts within messaging apps,” the company states.

In order to perform the voice-based search, users will have to set their language in the Voice settings in the Google app. To enable Voice Typing, users will have to install Gboard from the Play Store and choose the language in settings. The company notes that it has worked with native speakers to collect speech samples by asking them to read common phrases. Google says that its process helped train the company’s machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages. This process also helped improve accuracy when the system encountered more examples over time. The company says that the voice input for each of the languages is expected to get better with time. A few months ago, Gboard was updated to support 22 Indic languages including transliteration support.

Google notes that these new languages will be made available in the Cloud Speech API, which will soon be extended to other Google apps and products, including the translate app. It says that speech recognition now supports a total of 119 languages in Gboard for Android, Voice Search and more. 

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