Microsoft launches Phonetic Indic keyboards for Windows 10.
The keyboards are available in 10 Indian languages.
The company believes that these keyboards will improve typing speed by at least 20%.
Silicon Valley giants have been aggressively working towards personalising their services for the Indian market, and Microsoft is the latest company to expand its India-centric utilities. The Satya Nadella-led company has now released smart Phonetic keyboards for 10 Indian languages in Windows 10. The update is a part of its May 2019 update (19H1) for the OS and is aimed at making technology personalised and accessible for everyone.
Microsoft says that the updated virtual keyboard learns from the behaviour patterns and preferences of the user, and accordingly offers individualised word suggestions in Indian languages. The updated phonetic keyboards are available in Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam languages. These keyboards will allow Indians to work in their native/preferred languages.
“The new tools will not only help in making computing inclusive they are also expected to improve typing speed and accuracy in Indian languages by at least 20 percent. Moreover, they make many regional symbols (like the Indian numerals) easier to input. This has made it simple for users to input transliterated Indic text using the existing keyboards which traditionally have Latin characters inscribed on them,” Microsoft said in a press note.
For instance, if you type ‘Bharat’ in Latin characters, the Phonetic keyboard will transliterate final output to भारत (Hindi), ভারত (Bengali), ભારત (Gujarati) or ਭਾਰਤ (Punjabi) depending on the set target language. Unlike translation, Transliteration automatically converts text from one script to another. Prior to this update, Indic users were required to download Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool (ILIT) from the company’s Indic community website ‘Bhashaindia.com’ or a third-party tool.
The updated keyboards have automatically been made available with the latest Windows 10 update (19H1). Users who haven’t updated their operating system must do it to get access to these keyboards. To update the system, Go to Settings > Updates & Security > Windows Update. Once the OS is updated, users can activate the Phonetic keyboards by going to Language settings.
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