Google wants to make more people shout at their phone rather than type on it
Many people still feel embarrassed trying to use voice search on their handset in public
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Google is trying to get more people to dictate messages and searches, instead of typing them out.
The company says has now opened up voice typing to 119 language varieties and over a billion people around the world, and says switching from typing to talking will help users save time.
However, many phone users still feel embarrassed trying to use voice search on their phone in public.
Background noise often causes the feature to malfunction, forcing users to either shout at their phones or give up and switch back to regular typing.
In a blog post titled, “Type less, talk more”, Daan van Esch, Google’s technical program manager of speech, explained how the company used artificial intelligence to help it understand so many different languages.
“To incorporate 30 new language varieties, we worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, asking them to read common phrases,” he said.
“This process trained our 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.”
To voice type messages on your phone, download Gboard from the Play Store, pick your language, tap the microphone and start speaking.
To make Google searches using your voice, launch the Google app, open up the Settings menu and select your language.
You can now also type out emoji by speaking to your phone – by saying “winky face emoji”, for instance – but only in English and if you’re in the US.
Voice support for all 119 supported languages isn’t yet available across all of Google’s biggest products, such as Translate, but it will come to them in the future.
The full list of newly supported languages and locales follows:
- 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)
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments