14 DAY TRIAL // People started spotting a virtual keyboard on Google Search for several languages last week and it didn’t take long for Google to finish testing and the roll-out. The company is officially announcing the feature, which is now live for 35 languages. This will enable users to type in queries even if their real keyboard doesn’t support their language script.
“To overcome the difficulty [some users] face in typing in their local language scripts, some people have resorted to copying and pasting from other sites and from online translation tools. But there’s an easier way — a virtual, or ‘on-screen’ keyboard,” Manish Bhargava, product manager Google Internationalization, wrote.
“Last year, to make text input easy for people across the globe, we introduced a virtual keyboard API through code.google.com. This allowed developers to enable virtual keyboards on any text field or text area in their webpages. Today, we are taking this effort one step further by integrating virtual keyboards into Google search in 35 languages,” he added.
Local versions of the Google search engine in the languages now supported will get a small keyboard button next to the search box. Clicking on it will bring up the virtual keyboard in the users’ own language scripts. They can then employ the mouse to write their query or just their real keyboard by pressing on the corresponding key.
This last part is what makes the virtual keyboard feature really useful. Having an on-screen keyboard you can use with your mouse is fine, but it’s not much of an improvement in terms of usability. It gets the job done, but it’s going to be frustrating for longer queries. With Google’s implementation and a bit of practice, users will be able to type using their English keyboard just like it were a localized version.
Here are all the languages the virtual keyboard is now available in: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Galician, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mongolian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Tatar, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Uzbek.
