Google recognises Bangla voice input
STAFF REPORTER
Just imagine you are on your way to Chittagong and are interested in savouring the local cuisine, Mezbani Beef, in the port city.
To know the best places that serve the item keeping up with the local tradition, you will just have to bring out your smart phone and ask for restaurants that serve Mezbani Beef in Bangla.
You can also use seven other languages-- Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telug-- if you speak any of these. Starting from Saturday, one can use the eight Indic languages to give voice input and shun the use of a cell phone key board to search anything.
This is so, because Google, in a statement yesterday, said speakers of these languages will be able to use their voice to dictate both in Gboard on Android as well as in Search through the Google App. This feature was already available for Hindi.
Google has taken the measure to bring down language barriers that is important to making the internet more inclusive and work for everyone. This rings particularly true for us here in Bangladesh, where more Indic language users are coming online every day.
Thats why earlier this year, we launched a set of new products and features that help language users and better serve the needs of a billion users who are coming online, according to the Google statement.
The move will make searching in internet easier for the people. Typing on cell phones is slow and cumbersome. With the new upgrade, searching for stuff on phones in the eight languages will get faster.
The users can just talk to their phones to search for something and dont need to fiddle with tiny keyboards.
To search with voice input in one of the eight Indic languages, one has to open the Google app and pick their language in the voice settings menu (tap the top-left menu and go to settings, then pick voice and select language).
These new languages are also available in Cloud Speech API and will soon be available across other Google apps and products, including the Translate app. With the update, Googles speech recognition supports 119 language varieties, in Gboard on Android, Voice Search and more.
To incorporate the new language varieties, Google worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, asking them to read common phrases. The process trained machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and to improve their accuracy when exposed to more examples over time.
And voice input for each of the eight languages will get better over time, as more and more native speakers are making use of the product.
Type on Gboard with Your Voice
Using voice to dictate a message is not just convenient, but also up to three times faster than typing. Thats why voice typing on Gboard can be helpful to send any kind of message from your phonefrom responding to emails on the go, to sending texts to friends on messaging apps.
For instance, if someone is stuck in traffic on the way home and wants to send their family a message, s/he can just use voice input through Gboard on Android to let the family know that s/he will be a bit late for dinner.
