Google has announced that it will expand its speech recognition capabilities to support new languages. The global giant has said this move is part of its efforts to build on emerging markets, like India and Africa. Their considerable growth in developing a superior vernacular database will boldly impact the way we communicate across the world as well as with our own technology.
New users, and typically young users, are utilizing voice and video more than type. Therefore, tech giants are quickly tapping into this market.
The company states that 30 new languages and locales will be added, bringing the total to 119. According to Tech Crunch, the move means more people will have the ability to search the web by voice, as well as type via voice, using Google’s Gboard app.
The new languages will also be added to the Cloud Speech API, which currently supports 89 languages, and is used in several third-party voice and video applications; including transcription services, IVR applications, speech analytics applications and more. The new languages will also be added to Google Translate and other applications in due course.
A recent study by Search Engine Land expects that by 2020 more than 50% of all searches will be conducted by voice. Google revealed that more than 20% of its searches were conducted by voice last year, and an increasing amount of customers are using their voice services on a daily basis.
According to PRWeb, voice-search devices are becoming extremely popular and more people are using the technology to search the internet or to make commands.
Tech Giants Expand Beyond Traditional Digital
Tech giants are moving into emerging markets and new sectors, like Google’s jump into healthcare. As the price of internet access and technologies fall dramatically around the world, more people are frequently connecting to the web. Subsequently, companies like Google are becoming the first to target these new markets, increasing their sales and improving technology in these developing regions.
“In India, especially, Google’s move to expand speech recognition tech could have a significant impact. The country is estimated to have some 420 million mobile internet users as of this June, making India one of the biggest markets in the world for companies like Apple, Google and Facebook to address,” Tech Crunch writes.
Google recently told The Wall Street Journal that it’s seeing “a new kind of internet user” – a group that’s “very different from the first billion” in terms of how they access the internet. New users, and typically young users, are utilizing voice and video more than type. Therefore, tech giants are quickly tapping into this market.
To develop their speech recognition capabilities for these new languages, “Google combined human labor with its machine learning technology.” The tech giant says that it has worked with native speakers in each territory to collect speaking samples to ensure their recognition software is up-to-date and accurate. They say this move has also helped to train their machine learning models to better understand the different words, so they can provide users with the best service.
