A lot of people are probably still not used to telling your phone to send a text for you without actually typing or touching your device. But obviously, dictating a message is faster than actually using your keyboard to type or swipe. Google seems to be pushing people to use voice typing support as they are now adding 30 more languages to the list of those that have support for speech recognition. The update also brings voice dictation for emojis, at least in the English language.
Some of the languages that now have voice typing support include an old language like Georgian, two of Africa’s biggest languages, Swahili and Amharic, and many other Indian languages (India has 22 actually). The addition of these languages brings Google’s total to 119 languages supported in apps like Gboard on Android, Voice Search, etc.
To be able to do this, they collected speech samples from native speakers to help train their machine learning models.
The 30 new languages are now available in the Cloud Speech API and soon, it will also be available across other Google products and apps like the ever-important Translate. You should enable the GBoard app as your default keyboard to use voice typing and enable voice search as well if you want to search without touching your phone, using any of the supported languages.
Another new thing that you can do, if you’re using the English language when voice typing, is to dictate what emoji you want to include in your message. You can add “winky face emoji” or “poop emoji” if the situation warrants it. Now the challenge is to actually memorize what the important emojis are called.
SOURCE: Google
