Categories: Mobile

Google expands Voice Search availability to 100 million new users

Google has added 13 new languages to Voice Search on Android bringing faster searching to potentially 100 million new users.

Voice Search is already available in 29 languages and, from today and over the course of next week, will be available in 42 languages and accents in total. The 13 new additions are Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak and Swedish.

With each new language addition, Google would usually collect “hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers”. Instead of this usual method, however, Google hired a handful of native speakers that provided pronunciations for thousands of words. They then built a “machine learning system” based on this small amount of data to predict how all other words in their respective languages would be pronounced.

This machine learning method is a time-saving exercise.

Android 2.2 users and above can avail of the update using the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on their device’s homescreen. The Voice Search app can also be downloaded from Google Play.

Although this update is only concerned with Android, we’d expect to see these languages also added to Voice Search for Google Chrome soon.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

Recent Posts

OpenAI submitted models to the hardest math test yet for AI

OpenAI published its proof attempts on February 14 for First Proof, a challenge put together…

1 day ago

The hidden costs of sedentary work: Why prevention starts at your desk

We all know that a sedentary lifestyle is harmful to our health. But recent studies…

1 day ago

Solving the headache of migrating cloud-based mailboxes for the enterprise

As organizations increasingly operate across hybrid and cloud-based email systems, migrating enterprise mailboxes has become…

1 day ago

Digital ID, programmable money pave way for ‘dystopian hellhole, horrific totalitarian regimes’: ESN at European Parliament

Digital ID, programmable money like Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and AI are paving the…

3 days ago

Elon Musk says tariffs make solar artificially expensive in the U.S. But there is much more at play: Op-ed

Earlier this year, Elon Musk was direct about what comes next for the global economy:…

4 days ago

Britive Unified PAM Integrates with New Extended Plan for AWS Security Hub

Britive, provider of a unified privileged access management (PAM) platform, today announced its unified PAM…

4 days ago