Google personalizes voice search for Indic language

To solve the challenge for India’s next billion users, Google has announced the launch of voice search in eight additional Indian languages.

Along with Hindi, the new languages include Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. 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 voice-based search, users will need to set their language in the Voice settings menu in Google app.

To enable Voice Typing, users can install Gboard from the Play Store and choose their language from the Settings. Then all it takes is tapping the microphone to start speaking. Voice search in these new languages will be available in Google Search on iOS as well.

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. Voice input for each of these languages is expected to get better over time, as more and more native speakers use the product.