Google Adds More African Dialects, Languages in Speech Recognition

Have you tried speaking your search word to Google and ended up seeing something other than what you had in mind? Then, you will be in a better position to value the fact that Google has just included an additional 30 languages which include English dialects of four African countries on its Google voice recognition. These countries are Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania.

The new languages will soon be available across Google services and products including apps like Google Translate. The newlyadded 30 languages include Dialectal English (for Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania) Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijini, Bengali, Georgian, Gujurati, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Sinhala, Sundanese, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. It would cater for an additional 1 billion new audience as well.

According to Google, this addition implies that Google is presently offering language support for 30 new international locations which are mostly centred on the Indian subcontinent and Africa.

What’s more, US English users can now add an emoji with voice dictation in a voice search. This means that you can search for a ‘smile emoticon’ now by simply calling it. This feature will be available to more languages in the near future.

Having previously added other languages, including Nigerian languages, available in text, making users feel more at home, Google just made it easier for more users to speak in tongues on the internet. We believe this will greatly improve the ease of use of Google, and may increase its soaring user rating. Already, research shows that using your voice to dictate a message can be up to three times faster than typing. 

This development would be great for when you can’t type, so you just speak to Google and you don’t have to worry if it got you correctly, as it understands your accent. As it stands, Gboard for Android has voice recognition for 119 languages in total.