Google on Thursday hosted a virtual dubbed Google L10n in India to introduce new localized features for its services. In the event, the company announced a range of new features to help deliver an even richer language experience to millions of users across India. These include adding major local languages to more of Google’s products, including Maps, Lens, and Search.
Note that the tech giant already allows users to use its services like Gboard and Google Assistant in local languages. But now, it seems like Google is aiming to onboard more new users in India and reach a wider userbase by introducing local language support to more of its products. Here’s what new local features are coming to you while interacting with Google and its services.
Indian Language Search Results Made Easy
Google is mainly bringing two changes to the search results and how they appear in India. These include the addition of four new Indian languages — Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, and Marathi — apart from the already-existing Hindi and the introduction of search results in the local language for English queries. In the first case, users can easily toggle between English and the five aforesaid Indian languages by tapping the language ‘chip’ or tab in search results. The second change is that over the next month, Google Search will start showing results in local languages even if a user types a language query in English.
Google Maps Gets Nine New Indian Languages
One of the most used navigation services, Google Maps is getting support for nine new local languages in India. “This will allow Indian users to search for places, get directions and navigation, and interact with the Map in their preferred local language,” said Google in its India blog post. To choose the local language, users can simply open the app and head to “Settings > App language” and select their language from Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, and more. Here’s how the whole UI, search, and navigation will display in your local language.
Get Homework Help in Hindi Using Google Lens
With Google Lens, the tech giant also wants to make life easier for students and their parents by adding Hindi. The ‘Homework’ feature in Lens lets students scan the maths equation, like… quadratic equations, and get the solution. By introducing Hindi, Google wants to reach more students and help them by showing the steps for answers in Hindi.
Apart from all these new localized features, Google has said that it is developing various machine learning algorithms and AI to understand Indian languages. The company also unveiled MuRIL (Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages) in the L10n event. It provides support for transliterated text, such as when writing Hindi using Roman script. It also understands the sentiment of the query to deliver accurate results.
MuRIL is open source and currently supports 16 Indian languages other than English. The company says it could form a better foundation for students, researchers, startups, and anyone else interested in building Indian language technologies. You can download MuRIL from here.
