Over the next month, Google Search will start to display relevant content in supported Indian languages where applicable, even if the query is written in English.
In a bid to offer a richer language experience to millions of its users, Google India announced on Thursday that it will allow people to toggle their search results between English and four additional languages: Tamil, Telugu, Bangla and Marathi.
The company said that over the next month, Search will start displaying relevant content in supported Indian languages when appropriate, even if the local language query is written in English. “This functionality will also better serve bilingual users who are comfortable reading both English and an Indian language. It will be implemented in five Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu,” Google said during its’ L10n virtual event. ‘. .
The company announced a range of features in its products for the Indian market, with a commitment to invest more in ML and AI efforts at its research center in the country and to partner with innovative startups that are creating solutions in the local languages.
On Google Maps, users can now quickly and easily switch their Maps experience to one of the nine Indian languages.
“This will allow users to search for places, get directions and navigation, and interact with the map in their preferred local language.”
Since the launch of Hindi and other language features, Google has seen a more than 10-fold increase in Hindi queries in Search India.
“Today in India, more than 50 percent of the content viewed on Google Discover is in Indian languages,” the company reported.
One third of Google Assistant users in India use it in an Indian language, and since the Assistant’s language selector was launched, inquiries in Indian languages have doubled.
The tech giant said that at Google Research India, it has spent a lot of time helping computer systems understand human language.
“The new approach that we developed in India is called Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (or ‘MuRIL’). MuRIL currently supports 16 Indian languages in addition to English,” Google reported.
Google said that it has now made MuRIL open source and that it is currently available to download for free from the TensorFlow Hub.
“We hope that MuRIL will be the next great evolution for understanding the Indian language, forming a better foundation for researchers, students, start-ups and anyone else interested in developing Indian language technologies,” Google noted.
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