With over 400 million active Internet users, India is one of the most important markets for the global tech giants. Electronic companies and service providers are flocking to set up their base camp in India and strengthen their services. Google is no stranger to this migration and the company has launched a number of products to cater to the Indian audience. Taking another step in strengthening the scope of its services in the nation, Google on Tuesday announced a number of tools that will help the people to make better use of its services.
Take a look at the key updates:
Google Translate upgraded
Google has upgraded language translation tool– Google Translate, adding a number of features to it. To begin with, Google has brought its ‘Neural Machine Translation’ technology to Google Translate, to help users translate text between English and nine other Indian languages including– Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada.
So how is this better?
As of now, Google translates a sentence word by word instead of understanding the sense that it is meant to convey. The new technology uses broader context to figure out the most relevant translation and readjusts the text to be more like human speech with proper grammar.
Gboard supports 22 Indian languages
Google has added support for 11 new Indian languages to the existing list of 11 languages with transliteration support for languages including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and Gujarati. The company has also dropped a new text editing tool that makes it easier for the users to select, copy and paste. The new Gboard also supports new options for resizing and repositioning the keyboard so it fits into your hand.
But that’s not it as the updated Gboard also supports ‘auto-correction and prediction in these new languages’ which would let users spell words phonetically using the QWERTY keypad and get text output in their native language.
Google Maps gets auto-translate option
Apart from Google Translate and Gboard, Google Maps has also been updated to include support for Indian languages. Starting today, the company will add translations to local reviews on Google Maps (on both mobile and desktop platforms) automatically. This includes reviews of local cafes and restaurants.
So how does this work?
Suppose you speak Punjabi and you are travelling to Chennai and you want to check out reviews of popular restaurants in the city, starting today you will be able to see reviews in both the languages in Google Maps (isn’t that awesome!).
Google gets Hindi dictionary
Google, in collaboration with the Oxford University Press, is bringing the Rajpal & Sons Hindi dictionary online (yes, it’s happening!). “This new experience supports transliteration so you don’t even need to switch to a Hindi keyboard,” Google wrote in a blog. So next time you search for the meaning of a word like ‘Praudaugiki’, you will instantly see the meaning and ‘dictionary definitions on the search results page along with the English translation’ instead of the links to the website that offer the translation.
