Google Translate has introduced handwriting input mode for five Indian languages - Gujarati, Kannada, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu on the web and its Android app. The company has also updated its Google Translate iOS app to offer handwriting support for two Indian languages - Kannada and Tamil. With this, Google now offers handwriting support in seven Indian languages, having added support for Hindi last August and Marathi sometime earlier this year. Last month, Google Translate had released an updated version of its iOS app to add handwriting support for four Indian languages - Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Telugu. Besides Google Translate, this input mode is also available on Google's mobile search site and desktop version of Gmail and Google Drive. We tried the Google Translate app on Nexus 4 and noticed that one can select their preferred language among the supported ones from the drop down menu at the top and tap on the handwriting icon on the app home screen. This opens up a blank canvas which allows users to write characters from their preferred language and the app automatically starts suggesting possible words & the respective translation for these words in the chosen language, based on what the user is writing. We found the handwriting recognition and the respective translations to be quite accurate although there seems to be a bug in the app due to which a single word is being repeated multiple times if we write a sentence at once. However, it works fine if you keep choosing one of the suggested words…
