Hot on the heels of the Wall Street Journal's "The End of Typing: The Next Billion Mobile Users Will Rely on Video and Voice" article, Google has announced voice search in 8 additional Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. This voice based dictation and search will be available on Gboard on Android, and in search using the Google App, and more importantly, via Google's Cloud speech API. They will be launched across other Google apps and products, including the Translate app. Where this development leads us is the introduction of Google Home in India, which is entirely voice based. Note that Gboard supports 22 Indian languages, so that's still 13 languages to go, for enabling voice search/typing. Why is this important? Voice search is essentially a combination of two process: the first is converting voice to text. This becomes complex as voices, tonality, phrasing and dialects change across a language. As Google indicated in its blog post: "To incorporate the new language varieties, we worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, asking them to read common phrases. 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. And voice input for each of these language will get better over time, as more and more native speakers are making use of the product." This part essentially covers the voice to text bit, but what improves results…
