Google’s Gboard is receiving an update today that brings voice typing to 30 languages from around the world. These 30 languages mean Gboard supports speech recognition in 119 language varieties, covering more than a billion people. On a related note, you can now voice dictate in emoji. Oh yeah.
Google says that speech recognition supports ancient languages that date back to the 10th century and that they worked with native speakers to collect samples to help their learning models understand both sounds and words. This all, of course, should help with accuracy.
Here is the full list of supported languages, according to Google:
- 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)
- Urdu (Pakistan, India)
As for the emoji stuff, you really can open Gboard, tap the microphone button and say, “fire emoji” rather than hunting for it through the hundreds of available emoji in the keyboard. Yay.