Google India has announced a range of new features that will help users overcome the language barriers at the L10n event today. The tools have been introduced across Google products like Google Assistant, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Lens, and Discover. These features use machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) and are aimed at delivering a richer and better language experience to users. Furthermore, these tools are designed to make transliteration more convenient for users. Let’s have a look at these features in detail.
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Convenient toggling between English and Indian languages: Formerly, Google helped users change any query typed into English to Hindi using the Hindi chip or tab. This feature has now been extended to four Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, and Marathi. Now, users can toggle between English and Indian languages during Google Search with just a tap on the dedicated button.
Support in more Indian languages extended to Search: Over the next month, Search will start to show relevant content in supported Indian languages where appropriate, even if the local language query is typed in English. This functionality will also better serve bilingual users who feel comfortable reading both English and an Indian language. It will roll out in five Indian languages including Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.
Users can type in their queries in their native language using Roman characters, more like how users type their text messages these days Google noted that it takes three-time longer if a user types out in the native language compared to English. As a result, many users search in English even if they really would prefer to see results in a local language they understand.
“People often select a specific language for a particular situation. Rather than guessing preferences, we launched the ability to easily change the language of Google Assistant and Discover to be different from the phone language,” Anand Rangarajan, engineering director, Google noted at the event.
Support in more Indian languages extended to Maps: Google is also extending this ability to Google Maps, where users can quickly and easily change their Maps experience into one of nine Indian languages, by simply opening the app, going to Settings, and tapping App language. This will allow users to search for places, get directions and navigation, and interact with the Map in their preferred local language.
Image translation through Google Lens: Users can use Lens to snap a photo of a math problem and learn how to solve it on. their own, in Hindi or English. To do this, Lens first turns an image of a homework question into a query. Based on the query, Google will show step-by-step guides and videos to help explain the problem. Further, this feature can be used to translate direction boards, street signs, and restaurant menus in their preferred language. In India, Google Lens supports nine Indian languages.
MuRIL helps understand the sentiment of the sentence: Google has further introduced Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL). MuRIL helps in the smarter understanding of the sentiment and classification of a sentence. It is one model that caters to different languages. “Among many other benefits of this powerful multilingual model that scales across languages, MuRIL also provides support for transliterated text such as when writing Hindi using Roman script, which was something missing from previous models of its kind,” Google noted. MuRIL supports sixteen Indian languages. Google has made MuRIL open source, and it is currently available to download from the TensorFlow Hub, for free from https://tfhub.dev/google/MuRIL/1.
