Times Internet owned music streaming service Gaana has updated its Android app interface to support 9 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi and Bhojpuri. The update will be launched on iOS soon. Users will be prompted on opening the app for the first time to select their preferred language, while existing users can change the setting under ‘language preferences’. Overall, Gaana seems to have implemented the languages well, with all text but the song names in English appearing in the local language. Prior to this update, Gaana let users sort through songs based on the language, although the interface was exclusively in English. According to the company, the update will make the app more accessible for users outside Tier 1 cities. Why Indian languages are important As we have said before, Indian language interfaces are necessary for those users who aren’t particularly familiar with English, and intuitively, it will help new users become comfortable with transacting. Businesses wouldn’t want Internet usage to be limited to the users who are familiar with English: that’s a fraction of the country’s population. Adoption of Indic languages has increased as well - companies like BookMyShow, Amazon’s Kindle, Quikr, Snapdeal etc., all have atleast Hindi interfaces, and most support additional languages like Tamil, Telugu etc. SwiftKey and Facebook recently rolled out Hindi transliteration tools, while Google started displaying various search information in Hindi. Importantly, in December last year, BIS mandated Indian languages for handsets, which could encourage features like detecting…
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