Google's Gboard now supports 22 Indian languages

Google has announced that its Gboard app will now support all 22 scheduled Indian languages along with an integration for Hindi Dictionary on Search. Not just this, the tech giant has also introduced neural machine translation for nine Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Malayalam.

"Google wants to extend the internet for every Indian. We have identified gaps that bar Indians from accessing the internet. There are 400 million internet users in India and the number is expected to reach 600 million by 2020," said Rajan Anandan, Vice President, India and SouthEast Asia.

The keyboard supports both language keyboards and transliteration into native languages. Apart from this, Google has also brought in gesture/swiping-based typing to Gboard for Indian languages. There's also a new text editing tool that makes it easier for users to select, copy and paste, along with new options for resizing and repositioning the keyboard so that it fits the user's hand and texting style.

Google said it is also rolling out auto-translations to local reviews on Google Maps, both on mobile and desktop, following which all local reviews will appear in both the original language and the preferred language set by the user.

As for the neural machine translation for nine Indian languages, Google said, with the new update, one can expect more accurate and easier to understand translations, especially when translating full sentences.

The neural networks initially took 10 seconds to translate but the company worked on it and brought down the time to 0.2 seconds in two months, Google added. Neural translation which was introduced by the search giant in May last year translates full sentences at a time instead of the old phrase-based system that translated pieces of a sentence.

Last but not the least is the Hindi dictionary from Rajpal & Sons dictionary in collaboration with the Oxford University Press that will allow users to search for a Hindi word to get word meanings and dictionary definitions on the search results page.