• Google has announced that a further 15 African languages will be supported across several of its platforms.
• The languages will be supported on Voice Search, talk-to-type on Gboard, and dictation on Translate.
• Voice support from Google now includes 25 from Africa and 94 languages in total.

Localisation is always our first question when any technology company announces a new solution or service, but catering to every segment in a region can be quite difficult. In the case of Google it has been focusing heavily on supporting local languages of late, which will of course go a long way in accelerating the uptake of any new offerings it brings to market.

Having rolled out more language support for its AI-powered Google Gemini platform earlier this month, now the company is adding support for African languages across a number of its search and type tools.

To that end, it is adding support for a further 15 African languages, with it being made available on Voice Search, the talk-to-type function on Gboard, and the dictation feature in Google Translate.

Google pointed out that this was only made possible thanks to a partnership with a research team based in Accra, Ghana. “Google 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,” it highlighted.

“Along with the 13 African languages which already enjoy talk-to-text support on Gboard and Voice Search, Google is excited to extend voice input to 12 more languages on these platforms. Google is also extending voice input to 13 more African languages on Google Translate – along with the 9 already supported,” it added in a release shared with Hypertext.

The newly supported African languages for Voice Search and Gboard are:

• Chichewa,
• Hausa,
• Igbo,
• Kikuyu,
• Nigerian Pidgin,
• Oromo,
• Rundi,
• Shona,
• Somali,
• Tigrinya,
• Twi,
• Yoruba.

The languages getting support for voice input on Translate are:

• Chichewa,
• Hausa,
• Igbo,
• Oromo,
• Rundi,
• Shona,
• Somali,
• South Ndebele,
• Swati,
• Tigrinya,
• Tswana,
• Twi,
• Yoruba.

As for how it has able to add such a large number of languages of late, Google points to the power of AI. In particular it noted that, “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,” it continued.

[Image – Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash]