As a multi-cultural society, Australia has a broad swathe of different languages being spoken and today Google is adding support for 30 more languages meaning that more than a billion people can now voice search in GBoard for Android, Assistant and more. There’s also a bonus for US English users, with Google adding the ability to use voice dictation to use an Emoji.
From the full list of languages, it appears that the update centres mostly on the Indian sub-continent region as well as Africa, but there’s a good mix of language and it’s great to see more people getting access to Google’s services. Google added the languages taking care to collect speech samples from native speakers recording reading common phrases to ensure accuracy.
The full list of languages includes:
- 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 says the languages are available in the Google Cloud Search API but will be adding the languages to more services including the Translate app in the future.
As a bonus for Emoji lovers, at least those in the US, Google is adding a new feature to help you find the appropriate emoji faster. Unicode 10 added 56 new emoji, and Unicode 11 looks to be adding 67, so finding the right Emoji is hard. Now in addition to searching or drawing the emoji you can simply ask Google to find it. You can say “winky face emoji” to find: ? or maybe try something a little more poopy.
Google will be bringing the voice search for emoji to the US today, with other languages to roll out soon.
