14 DAY TRIAL // Mountain View-based Internet giant Google has just announced the addition of new features to its Voice Search solution, with the inclusion of support for Zulu and Afrikaans, along with South African-accented English.
Voice Search has been constantly updated with new features during the past few months, and now it offers support for more languages than before.
Moreover, the company decided that it should expand the availability of its service to far more languages than one might expect, thus the support for Zulu and Afrikaans.
“Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages,” a recent post on Google's Mobile Blog reads.
“We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines.”
According to Google, the speech research community should focus more on these underrepresented languages, so as to make sure that advancements are made in speech recognition, translation, and more.
“We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies,” the said blog post continues.
“The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers,” the company continues.
Google also unveiled the fact that they collaborated with the Multilingual Speech Technology group at South Africa’s North-West University led by Prof. Ettiene Barnard for the addition of the new features to Google Search by Voice.
As Google notes, this is the first release of Voice Search in a native African language, and the company plans on adding support for more of them in the future.