Yesterday, Google announced that it has added support for 30 new languages and dialects to voice search. This the company says is to make it easier for people around the world to search and even translate using their voice. Out of the 30 languages added, Swahili is the one that stands out for me as it is widely used in Kenya. Google hopes that this will get more people who use Swahili (and the 29 other languages) will use voice more than they do now.
In a statement, Google said, “today we’re bringing voice typing (aka talking to your phone instead of typing) to 30 new languages and locales around the world, covering more than a billion people.” The company also said that with the addition of these languages, its speech recognition now supports 119 language varieties on Voice search, Gboard and more.
Google revealed that it worked with natives and collected speech samples to incorporate all languages. They fed the necessary information to the machines (voice neural machine learning) that used specific sounds and words to train themselves to understand and improve accuracy as they were exposed to more examples over time.
Some of the new languages added include:
Amharic (Ethiopia)
Armenian (Armenia)
Azerbaijani (Azerbaijani)
Bengali (Bangladesh, India)
English (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania)
Georgian (Georgia)
Gujarati (India)
Javanese (Indonesia)
Kannada (India)
Khmer (Cambodian)
Lao (Laos)
Latvian (Latvia)
Malayalam (India)
Marathi (India)
Nepali (Nepal)
Sinhala (Sri Lanka)
Sundanese (Indonesia)
Swahili (Tanzania, Kenya)
Tamil (India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia)
Telugu (India)
Urdu (Pakistan, India)
Google will be adding these new languages to its other properties to not only allow speech recognition but also instant translation and voice search.