14 DAY TRIAL // Along with the rise of the smartphone, alternative input methods are becoming increasingly needed. The one with the most potential, voice input, is gradually getting better. Google has a deep interest in the mobile space and in voice technology in particular and has now introduced support for Korean voice input, the first non-English language.
"Korean Voice Search, by focusing on finding the correct web page for a spoken query, has been quite successful since launch," Mike Schuster and Kaisuke Nakajima, from Google Research, wrote.
"We have improved the acoustic models several times which resulted in significantly higher accuracy and reduced latency, and we are committed to improving it even more over time," they added.
Voice search is now available in a number of languages. It was rolled out for English in 2008 and then introduced for Mandarin, Japanese, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
Korean was the latest addition in June this year. But Google is making Korean the first language outside English to get full voice input support.
"Korean is the first non-English language where we are launching general voice input. This launch extends voice input to emails, SMS messages, and more on Korean Android phones. Now every text field on the phone will accept Korean speech input," Google explained.
It's unclear why Korean was chosen, either because of the importance of the market or because the research was more advanced.
Regardless, Google says that voice input has different challenges to voice search. While the latter just has to direct the users towards the page they are looking for, voice input has to be able to handle long phrases and more obscure words.
The voice input technology was improved and tweaked by using millions of Korean language sentences which are more likely to be spoken. Google also used parts of blog posts, news articles and so on to train the system.
However, this means that voice input will work better for this kind of sentences, but it may have problems with more obscure phrases. Google hasn't said when the new feature will be available to Android users.