Google Just Added Voice Recognition For These Additional 30 Languages

Google has added voice recognition for an additional 30 languages, opening voice-based services to more than a billion people in 119 languages.

“To honor languages around the world, speech recognition will support ancient languages such as Georgian, which has an alphabet that dates back to the 10th century,” wrote Daan van Esch, technical program manager of speech at Google in a company blog post. “We’re also adding Swahili and Amharic, two of Africa’s most widely-spoken languages, as well as many Indian languages on our quest to make the internet more inclusive.”

The additional languages, from Azerbaijani to Urdu, are now available for voice search and Voice Typing on Gboard on Android devices and “will soon be available across other Google apps and products, including the Translate app,” wrote van Esch.

To expand their language coverage, Google “worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, asking them to read common phrases. This process trained our machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and to improve their accuracy when exposed to more examples over time,” wrote van Esch. A full list of the new languages and locales can be found here.

Be sure to check out our list of the world’s oldest languages still spoken in the world today, and see if you agree with our take on the most beautiful languages in the world.

About the author

Claire Lancaster

Tech & Entrepreneurship Editor

English-American, Claire has lived and worked in the U.S., South America, Europe and the UK. As Culture Trip’s tech and entrepreneurship editor she covers the European startup scene and issues ranging from Internet privacy to the intersection of the web with civil society, journalism, public policy and art. Claire holds a master’s in international journalism from City University, London and has contributed to outlets including Monocle, NPR, Public Radio International and the BBC World Service. When not writing or travelling, she can be found searching for London's best brunch spot or playing with her cat, Diana Ross.