Google's new features empower Indian language consumer base

Aiming to cater to the needs of one and all, Google on Tuesday announced the launch of a range of new features to empower Indian language users to adapt to latest technology within the comfort zone provided by the language of their choice.

Recently, a study conducted by the tech major in collaboration with KPMG India revealed that 234 million Indian language users are currently online, as against 175 million users browsing in English. To cater to this increase in demand, Google is looking at localising its features to suit the needs of such users, thereby enabling them to avail all the benefits of its products.

The report titled "Indian Languages - Defining India's Internet" throws light on the various challenges faced by Internet users in India with the most prominent being the lack of content available in regional languages.

Through its launch, Google is looking to address the needs of those using the Internet services in regional languages and also create awareness about the same.

"Google will be rolling out a series of initiatives to spread awareness among Indians of the services that are being offered to them. We have scripted such initiatives in the past as well. Through the launch, we are looking to make our services available to one and all," Rajan Anandan, VP, India and South East Asia, Google, told ANI.

Starting today, Google Translate will use Google's new Neural Machine Translation technology to translate between English and nine widely used Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada. In comparison to the decade old practice of a phrase-based translation system, neural translation enables the translation of sentences as a whole, rather than being broken down into fractions.

Google also announced the extension of the neural machine translation to Chrome browser's built-in Auto-Translate functionality to web content, making full-page translations more accurate and easier to read. This will enable the Indian language speakers to consume all of the web's content in nine Indian languages with higher quality translations of everything.

The new translation capability will also be available to users on Google search and Maps to aid discovery of new places with translations of local reviews on Google Maps, both on mobile and desktop.

Taking the importance of localisation a step further, Google rolled out the all new GBoard with transliteration support for Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu and Gujarati. GBoard allows the users to search and use Google Translate right in their keyboard.

For users who often switch back and forth between Hindi and English, they will also be able to use Hinglish language option with new text editing tool that makes it easier to select, copy and paste, plus new options for resizing and repositioning the keyboard.

Like Google Indic Keyboard, GBoard offers auto-correction and prediction in these new languages, plus two layouts for each?one in the native language script and one with the QWERTY layout for transliteration, which lets users spell words phonetically using the QWERTY alphabet and get text output in their native language script.

Furthermore, the company in collaboration with the Oxford University Press facilitated the availability of a Hindi dictionary, thus allowing the users to use their existing keyboard to find meanings in Hindi.