MobileGoogle Voice Search Rolls Out to 13 More Languages

Google Voice Search Rolls Out to 13 More Languages

The update adds Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak and Swedish to the Google roster, bringing its supported languages up to more than 40.

google-voice-searchGoogle has increased the number of languages supported by its Voice Search application by 13.

The update adds Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, and Swedish to the Google roster, bringing its supported languages up to more than 40.

Users running Android 2.2 and above can voice search by tapping the microphone icon on the homescreen’s Google search widget. On older versions, users need to install the dedicated Voice Search app from the Google Play store.

Bertrand Damiba, a Google product manager, said that while some languages, for example Romanian, have “predictable pronunciation rules”, others are less straightforward, like Swedish.

To make the Voice Search feature available in these difficult languages the firm had to recruit native speakers to help it with the pronunciation of “thousands of words.”

“Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced,” Damiba said, adding that the more people who use the service the better it will become.

Google noted that users can only speak one language for each search, and may need to change their main language settings to use one of the new additions.

This post originally appeared on V3.

This article was originally published on V3.

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