Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

Google India has recently made a new announcement stating that it will let people toggle the Search results between English and four more languages – Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Marathi.

Google said that over the next month, Search will start to show relevant content in supported Indian languages wherever found to be appropriate and also if the local language query has been typed in English. Google stated at the ‘L10n’ virtual event that the function will better serve bilingual users who feel comfortable reading in English and in other Indian languages. It will be rolled out in five Indian languages – Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

Google adds new language features for Indian users
Image Source : The Hans India

Google announced a range of features among its products for the Indian market with further commitment to invest in ML and AI efforts at the research centre in India and partner with new startups who are building solutions in local languages. Users can now also change their Maps experience into one of nine Indian languages in Google Maps. It will allow users to search places, get directions and navigation and interact with the Map in their preferred local language.

After the launch of Hindi and other language features, Google has seen more than 10 times increase in Hindi queries on Search in India. The company said that today in India, more than 50% of the content seen on Google Discover is in Indian languages. A few Google Assistant users in India are using it in Indian language and after the launch of Assistant Language picker, queries in Indian languages have increased. The tech giant added that at Google Research India, it has spent most of the time in helping computer systems for understanding human language.

Google informed that the new approach that has been developed in India is known as Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (or ‘MuRIL). At present, it supports 16 Indian languages along with English. The company said that it has now made MuRIL an open source and is at present available for free download from the TensorFlow Hub. Google noted that MuRIL will surely be the next big evolution for Indian language understanding and form a better foundation for researchers, students, startups and anyone else interested to build Indian language technologies.