Google brings more Indian languages to Search results in India

The company said that 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.

New Delhi: In a bid to deliver a richer language experience to millions of its users, Google India on Thursday announced to let people toggle their Search results between English and four additional languages: Tamil, Telugu, Bangla and Marathi.

The company said that 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.

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“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: Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu,” Google said during its ‘L10n’ virtual event.

The company announced a range of features across its products for the India market, with a commitment to further invest in the ML and AI efforts at its research centre in the country and partner with innovative startups who are building solutions in local languages.

In Google Maps, users can now quickly and easily change their Maps experience into one of nine Indian languages.

“This will allow users to search for places, get directions and navigation, and interact with the Map in their preferred local language”.

Since the launch of Hindi and other language features, Google have seen more than a 10 times increase in Hindi queries on Search in India.

“Today in India, more than 50 per cent of the content viewed on Google Discover is in Indian languages,” the company informed.

A third of Google Assistant users in India are using it in an Indian language, and since the launch of Assistant language picker, queries in Indian languages have doubled.

The tech giant said that at Google Research India, it has spent a lot of time helping computer systems understand human language.

“The new approach we developed in India is called Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (or ‘MuRIL’). MuRIL currently supports 16 Indian languages as well as English,” Google informed.

Google said it has now made MuRIL open source, and it is currently available to download for free from the TensorFlow Hub.

“We hope MuRIL will be the next big evolution for Indian language understanding, forming a better foundation for researchers, students, startups, and anyone else interested in building Indian language technologies,” Google noted.