Voice Search arrives in 13 new languages
Thursday, August 16, 2012
“Norwegian restaurants in New York City.” I can type that phrase fast, but I can say it even faster—and when I’m on the go, speed is what I’m looking for. With Voice Search, you can speak into your phone to get search results quickly and easily. Voice Search is already available in 29 languages, and today, we're bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users—bringing the total to 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. In fact, 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of:
Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for 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.
This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.
As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.
Posted by Bertrand Damiba, Product Manager
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Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for 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.
This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.
As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.
Posted by Bertrand Damiba, Product Manager
That's really cool. But I wonder when will we have commands on the current available languages? Like Brazilian Portuguese
ReplyDeleteYou include three of the four Scandinavian countries, but leave out Denmark! Wtf Google!
ReplyDeleteNobody understands Danish... Not even Danes
DeleteNobody speaks icelandic, so why should include that? ;-)
DeleteToday I have updated application but still don't have Serbian language.
ReplyDeleteGreat job :-). For all the guy's who aren't happy about... I think it's a huge job to make just one language aviable... So you see Google is hard working on it. It need time and more language's will be aviable... Just give lil time... I'm happy to see that more and more is working... Google rules :-)
ReplyDeleteEagerly waiting for brazilian Portuguese to be included.
ReplyDeleteWhere is the Turkish? Come ooon Google. You are really better then this.
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way. I mean like Siri. Personel Assistance.
DeleteWhat about Turkish? Why Google restricts some services for Turkey? Eg. navigation, street view...
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely you are right... Turkey is very big market For android platform but they dont care about Turkey... Yandex Will take all market in Turkey if they work like nowadays.
DeleteOld include Greek as well
ReplyDeleteWaiting in indian languages
ReplyDeleteI tried the romanian voice search and is still far from decent. I also don't have any sort of speach disability. Oh well, I'll wait...
ReplyDeleteLove it but when will you localize Voice Actions i'm waiting for it for 2 years. Why ia that so hard to bring voice actions with voice search ? Since os understand "navigate" in my native lang why it cant perform it ? That really bothers me.
ReplyDeleteIt all about how hard you try your best in life think. and come agin
ReplyDeleteGreek please...
ReplyDeleteMagyar nyelv nincs benne ....a kozlemeny nem valos!!!!
ReplyDelete