Google voice search now supports 8 new Indian languages

You can now dictate queries in Google search in more Indian languages.

In order to appeal more to the Indians, Google has further personalized its voice search with support for more Indian languages. Starting today, the Google voice search will support eight more Indian languages other than Hindi. The search app will now support Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. These languages are supported on Google Search on iOS as well.

Users will be able to dictate queries on Gboard on Android, and while searching through the standalone Google App as well. However, in order to use any of these languages for voice-search, users will be required to set their preference. To set a preferred choice, go to voice settings menu in the Google app, and select from the supported languages.

Voice-support on the Gboard or Google app makes search easier. It also aids those who are too lazy to type out queries or during activities such as driving. The new language support is also said to enhance voice typing on Gboard, thereby allowing those not too comfortable typing in regional languages to respond to messages or emails easily. 

In order to enable voice typing on Gboard, you need to first choose the preferred language from the app’s settings. Once you have selected the language of your choice, every time you tap on the microphone to dictate, the text will be typed out in that language. You can switch to other languages from the settings menu in the same manner. 

In a country like India, with 22 major languages and over 700 dialects, voice recognition becomes a complex algorithm. For the longest time, Google voice search supported only English, and it was only in 2014 that the search app quietly started supporting Hindi. Today’s support for more Indian languages comes after Google’s extensive work with native speakers to collect speech samples and train its artificial intelligence system to recognize accurately the spoken word. To further help develop more language content for the internet users in India, Google is also making the new languages available in the Cloud Speech API. It is also expected to soon extend to other Google apps and products, including the Translate app.