Google today updated its Google Search and GBoard applications for Android devices and expanded the number of languages supported in voice typing by 30.
Google said it worked with native speakers of these languages from around the world to build the needed speech sample data. In this round of additions, Google targeted African, Indian, and other Asia-Pacific dialects to help those who are coming online perhaps for the first time. Some of the bigger additions include Amharic and Swahili in Africa; Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu in India; Javanese and Sundanese in Indonesia; as well as Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Nepali, Sinhala, Tamil, and Urdu.
Google says these same languages have been added to the Google Speech API, so developers can add support for them to their own apps. Further, Google will soon support voice dictation for these languages within Google Translate.
Separately, English speakers in the U.S. can now use voice dictation to find and insert emoji into text. People can utter phrases like “winky face emoji” and GBoard for Android will find the proper emoji and drop it in. Google says it will add voice-dictated emoji support to more languages soon.
GBoard is free to download from the Google Play Store.
