Google adds voice search for 8 new Indian languages

Google has added voice search capability for eight additional Indian languages including Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil to help native speakers of these languages search for content online by simply speaking into their phones. The language support feature will be part of the Gboard app on Android and the Google App as well.

Currently, voice search feature is available only in English and Hindi in India. The other languages that have been added are Gujarati, 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,” said Google Technical Program Manager Daan van Esch.

“Globally, we now support voice search for 119 languages. We are introducing support for 30 new languages today, of which eight are Indian languages,” van Esch added.

Google said it worked with native language speakers in order to collect the speech samples. This process helped train Google’s machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and also improved the accuracy of the search.

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