Google voice search feature now supports 8 more Indian languages

They now adds support for 30 more languages, reaching further into Africa, India

Currently, in India, the voice search feature in Google is available in English and Hindi only. However, the search
feature will now get other languages like Malayalam,Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil as well.

"Globally, we now support voice search for 119 languages. We are introducing support for 30 new languages
today, of which eight are Indian languages," Google Technical Program, Manager Daan van Esch told the press.
"Starting today, 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."

In order to perform a voice­based search, need to set uour language in the voice settings menu in the
Google app. Then as regular you can just tap the microphone icon (usually on the home screen of Android smartphones) to start a voice search.

Lately, Google has been ramping support for Indian languages across its various products like Maps and Search.
This might particularly be due to a large number of the new users coming online are Indic language users.

Earlier this year, Google announced the launch of new products and features to help create more language content and address the needs of new users coming online. So this move basically comes as many users prefer to use voice
to dictate a message as it is convenient and also faster than typing.
Meanwhile, a report by Google­KPMG states that an estimated 536 million Indians are expected to use regional
languages while remaining online by 2021 as compared to about 199 million users who are expected to access the
web in English. This growth will be driven by increasing affordability of devices and data charges as well as the
availability of more local content, the report noted.
Interestingly, the report has also pointed that apart from Hindi, Marathi and Bengali users are expected to drive
volume growth, while Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu users are expected to be among the most digitally engaged
through 2016 to 2021.
"Voice search in these new languages will be available in Google Search on iOS as well. These will soon be
extended to other Google apps and products, including the Translate app," the company said.

The new languages are also available now in the Cloud Speech API, which already supported 89 languages, and is used in a number of third-party voice and video applications, like transcription services, speech analytics applications, IVR applications, and more.

The company says that it works with native speakers to collect speech samples by asking them to read common phrases. This, in turn, helped to train Google’s machine learning models to better understand the sounds and words of the new languages to improve their accuracy when they were exposed to more examples over time.

The full list of new languages includes the following:

• Amharic (Ethiopia)
• Armenian (Armenia)
• Azerbaijani (Azerbaijani)
• Bengali (Bangladesh, India)
• English (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania)
• Georgian (Georgia)
• Gujarati (India)
• Javanese (Indonesia)
• Kannada (India)
• Khmer (Cambodian)
• Lao (Laos)
• Latvian (Latvia)
• Malayalam (India)
• Marathi (India)
• Nepali (Nepal)
• Sinhala (Sri Lanka)
• Sundanese (Indonesia)
• Swahili (Tanzania, Kenya)
• Tamil (India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia)
• Telugu (India)
• Urdu (Pakistan, India)

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