Google has unveiled its voice search facility in eight additional Indian languages. In a statement, the technology major said that the latest move was part of its efforts to help solve the challenge for India’s next billion users. The new languages include Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Speakers of these languages will be able to use their voice to dictate queries — both in Gboard on Android as well as in Search through the Google App.
“Using voice to dictate a message is not just convenient, but it is also up to three times faster than typing,” the company said.
Google said users could now use voice input in their local language to search for what they are looking for without the need to type on a tiny keyboard, making the user experience that much faster and easier.
To perform voice-based search, users will need to set their language in the Voice settings menu in the Google app.
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.
While incorporating these new languages, Google has worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, asking them to read common phrases. This process not only helped train Google’s machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages but also improved the accuracy when the system encountered more examples over time.