Google has today announced the addition of 15 African languages on Voice Search, typing with voice on Gboard and voice input on Translate.
In a presser, the tech giant said enabling voice input across these products offers approximately 300 million more people across Africa the freedom to interact with the web and communicate with friends and family using the modality that comes most naturally to many people; their voice.
The company noted that it already supports typing input with custom keyboards in Gboard for around 200 African languages and varieties, with automatic translation with Translate for over 60 languages spoken in Africa.
Today, along with the 13 African languages which already enjoy talk-to-text support on Gboard and Voice Search, Google announced the extension of voice input to 12 more languages on these platforms.
It is also extending voice input to 13 more African languages on Google Translate, along with the 9 already supported.
“Voice input on Translate enables people to dictate, to Translate and get translations in other languages, while talk-to-text support on Gboard and Voice Search allows people to type with voice anywhere where Gboard is enabled, or Search on Google using their voice,” the company said.
Commenting on the announcement, Google Africa MD Alex Okosi said this technology will make a difference to over 300 million more people across the continent.
He said this enables them to interact with the web with just their voice.
“With teams in Google Accra working on this, it’s one example of how Google in Africa is building technology for Africans, and the world,” Okosi said.
On his part, Google President for EMEA Matt Brittin added that the next decade is set to be Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital decade with more than half the population accessing the Internet for the first time.
“Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Extending Voice Search, voice typing on Gboard and voice input on Translate to 300 million people across Africa is a key landmark in that,” he said.
These languages are spoken by an estimated 300 million people across West, East and Southern Africa.
In West Africa, Google now supports Twi, one of the most widely spoken languages in Ghana, as well as 4 major Nigerian languages, a country with over 500 languages and 218 million people.
Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin are spoken by an estimated 129 million people or around 60% of Nigeria’s population.
Google is also expanding its offering on Voice Search and Gboard in Kenya with the addition of Kikuyu, alongside Swahili as well as for wider East and Southern Africa.
These additions will bring Google’s total to 25 languages with voice support in Africa – and 94 languages total across the world.
Google said this language extension has been made possible by advances in AI, specifically multilingual speech recognition, which converts speech into text.
The AI model learns languages in the way a child would, learning to associate certain speech sounds with the specific sequences of character in the written form.
“Multilingual speech recognition models are trained on data from multiple languages, and then are able to transcribe speech into text in any of those languages,” Google said.
“Our mission to organise the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful, is therefore particularly relevant to the Sub-Saharan region especially as it is expected to account for most of the population growth in the 21st century.”
In Google’s Product Development Center in Nairobi, Kenya, and AI Research Center in Accra, Ghana, Googlers are building products that aim to solve problems on the continent and around the world.
Voice typing and Google translate form a core part of this work, ensuring that Google can better service this fast-growing region and ensure everyone has access to the benefits of technology.
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