Google hosted its L10n event on Thursday to present a list of features aimed at Indian-language users. One of the biggest announcements of the virtual event was the ability to toggle mobile search results between English and any of the four newly added Indian languages: Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, and Marathi. This comes as an extension of the existing option to switch search results between English and Hindi. Google also highlighted that its search engine would start displaying content in supported Indian languages even if the query was written in English. Google Maps also has the ability to allow users to view results in nine Indian languages in the app without changing the system language. Google also announced its multilingual model called Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL) to help computer systems understand Indian languages at scale.
Realizing that search queries in native languages of India were a huge draw, Google has released an update to switch search results between English and four additional Indian languages: Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, and Marathi, in addition to Hindi. The company had introduced the ability to toggle between English and Hindi in search results in June 2016. That was provided through a simple ‘chip’ or tab that users of their mobile devices could tap to see the results on their preferred language.
Google now lets you switch search results between English and four additional Indian languages
Google said that after introducing toggle between English and Hindi in search, it saw Hindi queries in India increase more than 10 times.
In addition to switching search results between the English and Indian languages, Google is updating its search engine with the ability to understand which language content will appear in even when a local language query is written in English. This new functionality will be rolled out over the next month in five Indian languages: Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Its aim is to help people get relevant content in supported Indian languages. Also, it would be helpful for bilinguals, who could understand English alongside their local language.
Google is allowing its search engine to start showing bilingual results
Google also brought a language selector to Google Maps to allow users to quickly change their language preference to one of the nine supported Indian languages. The update will allow users to search for places, get directions and navigation, and understand different settings in their preferred local language. It will be possible through Settings and touching App language.
Before the latest change, users could only change their preferred language on Google Maps by changing the system language of their devices.
Google Maps has a dedicated language selector that allows you to select your preferred language easily
Google initially brought a language selector similar to Google Assistant and Discover. The search giant highlighted that a third of Google Assistant users in India use it in an Indian language and since the launch of the language selector, queries in Indian languages have doubled. A similar impact has also been noted on Discover, which saw more than 50 percent of content viewed in Indian languages.
“Only in the last two years. India has added 400 million new Internet users from rural India, ”said Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and VP of Google India, during the L10n event. “Every new user coming online is an Indian language user, and we are committed to playing a role.”
Along with language-focused changes related to Search and Google Maps, Google has updated Lens integration within the Google mobile app to allow users to find easy ways to solve math problems in both Hindi and English. . You will just have to go to the search bar in the Google app and tap the Google Lens icon to take a picture of a math problem. This will allow the image recognition system to convert the image to a query and then get step-by-step guides and videos to help explain the problem.
Without giving the exact number of users, Google said that more people use Google Lens in India every month than in any other country in the world, with more than three billion words translated domestically using Lens in 2020 alone. It is likely that The new update further expands the use of Google Lens and ultimately provides the company with more data to improve its artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
Existing artificial intelligence developments at Google have already helped the company better understand Indian languages. This has led to the development of multilingual representations for Indian languages (or ‘MuRIL’), which has been created by a team of researchers from Google Research India. The new language model is designed to scale between languages and provide support for transliterated text. This helps, for example, when the text is written in Hindi with Roman script.
Google MuRIL aims to solve Indian language comprehension problems of computer systems
Google says that, unlike any traditional language model for training computer systems, MuRIL can help determine the sentiment of the sentence. This means that you can interpret the meaning of sentences, whether they are negative or positive. For example, if someone has written in Roman letters, “Achha hua account bandh nahi hua (I’m glad the account hasn’t been closed) ”. It is claimed that the language model correctly identifies this as a positive statement.
MuRIL also includes the ability to classify a person and a place. So, for example, if someone writes “Shirdi ke Sai Baba (Sai Baba of Shirdi) ”, I would correctly interpret him as a person.
Google, of course, admits that despite many updates on existing language models, MuRIL is not a perfect model for understanding human language. However, he optimistically believes that the new development would help form a better foundation for people like researchers, students and startups interested in building Indian language technologies.
MuRIL supports 16 Indian languages in addition to English and is available as free and open source through the TensorFlow Hub.
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