Google has announced a number of features to help provide better language experience for millions of Indian users. While Google is bringing many of its products to India, they are facing a tough language challenge.
The American multinational technology company highlighted in its Google for India event held earlier this year that: While it was just enough to focus on developing products in other parts of the world, in India, the tech giant had to implement this development with the support of all the most popular languages in the country. Only then can all users in India access the Internet.
Various features that Google plans to help provide a better language experience to Indian users:
A new machine learning model
The tech giant has announced that they have introduced a new model of machine learning that will help in better understanding of the human language. This model is called Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages or MuRIL.
This model aims to scale across different Indian languages and can support transliterated text. This means that after years of people writing Hindi in Roman script, the model would have support for it. This model would also be good at accurately understanding the feeling of an Indian language sentence. It also helps to identify whether a statement is about a person or a place.
Google claimed that the model would be the next significant step in the understanding of Indian languages and would help create a stronger base for students, researchers and start-ups.
Convenient switch
This feature will allow people to switch search results between any language and English by tapping a simple tab. In 2016, Google had introduced this feature in Hindi. But the company has now confirmed that it is planning to introduce this easy switch tab in four additional Indian languages – Marathi, Bangla, Tamil as well as Telugu.
Queries can be typed in English or local languages
Google says that if a person tries to make a query in their native language, it can take up to three times as long to type in English. However the company has now announced that Search will begin displaying the related content in multiple Indian languages over the coming month. Then it doesn’t matter whether the query has been typed in English or the local language.
This feature will also help bilingual people. This can currently support five languages in India – Bangla, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi.
Preferred language in apps
The feature that allows people to select their preferred language for Discover as well as Google Assistant and separate it from the language set for the phone will be extended to Google Maps, where users will be able to choose from nine Indian languages.