Google has added 15 more African languages on Voice Search, typing with voice on Gboard and voice input on Translate.
- In Kenya and East Africa, Google says it is expanding its offering on Voice Search and Gboard with the addition of Somali, Kikuyu, Rundi, Tigrinya, Amharic and Oromo, alongside Kiswahili and Dholuo.
- In West Africa, Google now supports Twi, one of the most widely spoken languages in Ghana, as well as 4 major languages of Nigeria, 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.
“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 – and extending Voice Search, voice typing on Gboard and voice input on Translate to 300 million people across Africa is a key landmark in that,” Matt Brittin, President of Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa said.
The language extension has been made possible by advances in AI, specifically multilingual speech recognition – which converts speech into text. 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. 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.
“This technology will make a difference to over 300 million more people across the continent – enabling 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 for the world,” Alex Okosi, Managing Director of Google Africa said.
