Microsoft has announced, in a blog post, the release of of a new phonetic keyboard that supports 10 Indian languages. Part of its May 2019 update of Windows 10, the phonetic keyboard is available in Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Microsoft said that before this, Indic language users had to buy customised Indic hardware keyboards or stickers, or download Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool or a third-party tool. The new keyboards are phonetic, meaning users will enter text in Latin characters, which will be transliterated into the appropriate language. For example, if a user types ‘Bharat’ in Latin characters, the keyboard will transliterate final output to भारत (Hindi), ভারত (Bengali), ભારત (Gujarati) or ਭਾਰਤ (Punjabi) depending on the target language. Microsoft said it expects the new tools to improve typing speed and accuracy in Indian languages by at…
