India has the fastest growing smartphone market in the world, with millions of people coming online every day and using one of the many services offered by Google. However, since regional languages are still predominant in India, many Indians have had trouble using Google’s services since they are in English.
Today, the company announced that it is making the life of users in India easier by adding support for eight new local Indian languages to voice typing in Gboard for Android. These new languages will also be supported by the Google app.
As per Google, voice typing is up to 3x times faster than typing a message but it has supported limited languages so far. In India, Voice typing has supported Hindi since quite a while but support for other regional languages has been missing so far. Starting from today, Google is bringing voice typing support to popular regional languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and more. In addition, Google is also adding support for other languages like Lao, Latvian, Amharic, Armenian, and Georgian.
Overall, Voice typing will now support 30 new languages with the total number of supported languages now standing at 119. The full list is as follows:
- 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)
Google will also be making support for these languages available to its Cloud Speech API so they will automatically be supported by other Google apps and services over the coming days and weeks. For now, only the Google Search app and Gboard for Android have support for these new languages.
[Via Google]