Google adds voice search feature for 8 more Indian languages

BENGALURU: Google has announced the launch of voice search in eight Indian languages to enable consumers use their voice for search queries on the company’s flagship search app and its keyboard app Gboard.

The eight new Indian languages include Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Urdu. Prior to this, Google’s voice search supported only Hindi language in India.

“We are introducing support for 30 new languages today (on Monday), of which eight are Indian languages. Globally, we now support voice search for 119 languages,” Google Technical program manager Daan van Esch told reporters in a press briefing.

Starting on Monday, these new languages will also be made available in Google’s Cloud Speech API, that enables developers to convert audio to text. It will be soon extended to other Google apps and products including Google Translate, the company said.

To improve the accuracy of this feature, Google said it has worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, asking them to read common phrases.