Google's products will now support voice typing in over 30 languages and locales around the world, including Swahili and Amharic.
Voice typing allows users to talk to their phones and have their words written out automatically instead of having to type the words.
Daan van Esch, Google's speech technical programme manager, says: "Using your voice to dictate a message can be up to three times faster than typing."
With this update, Google's speech recognition now supports 119 language varieties in its various products.
To enable voice typing, users need to download and install Gboard from the Google Play Store. Then to pick their language, they need to press the G in the suggestion strip and select the settings wheel. Then tap the microphone to start speaking.
The list of newly supported languages and where they are from include: Amharic (Ethiopia), Armenian (Armenia), Azerbaijani (Azerbaijani), Bengali (Bangladesh, India), English (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania), Georgian (Georgia), Gujarati (India), Javanese (Indonesia), Kannada (India), Khmer (Cambodian), Lao (Laos), Latvian (Latvia), Malayalam (India), Marathi (India), Nepali (Nepal), Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Sundanese (Indonesia), Swahili (Tanzania, Kenya), Tamil (India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia), Telugu (India), and Urdu (Pakistan, India).
"To incorporate 30 new language varieties, we worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, asking them to read common phrases. This process trained our machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and improve their accuracy when exposed to more examples over time," says Van Esch.
These new languages will also be made available in Google's Cloud Speech API and will soon be available across other Google apps and products, including the translate app.
In the US, Google has added a feature in English that lets users voice-search for emoji. Saying 'crying-laughing-face' will insert the appropriate icon into the text. This feature is coming to more countries and languages soon.
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