Google India Adds Tamil, Telugu & Other Languages In Search Results To Extend Reach Within Native Users

A host of features have been announced by Google India across its products for the Indian market. Prominently, the search results will roll out in five Indian languages.

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New Delhi: Looking to improve its penetration among the millions of users, Google India on Thursday announced that it will enable people to change their Search results between English and four additional languages: Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, and Marathi.  Over the next month, users will be able to see the Google Search show relevant content in supported Indian languages whenever appropriate. Additionally, the native language content will be visible even if the local language query is typed in English. "This functionality will also better serve bilingual users who feel comfortable reading both English and an Indian language. It will roll out in five Indian languages: Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu," Google stated during its ‘L10n' virtual event. A host of features have been announced by the company across its products for the Indian market. It has also committed to increasing investment in the Machine Learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) efforts at its research centre in the country and partner with innovative startups who are building solutions in local languages. In Google Maps, users will be able to switch to any of the nine Indian languages to easily change their Maps experience. "This will allow users to search for places, get directions and navigation, and interact with the Map in their preferred local language". Since the launch of Hindi and other language features, Google has seen more than a 10 times increase in Hindi queries on Search in India. "Today in India, more than 50 percent of the content viewed on Google Discover is in Indian languages," the company informed. As informed, a third of Google Assistant users in the country are using it in a native language and queries in Indian languages have doubled since the launch of Assistant language picker. The search giant revealed that it has spent a lot of time aiding computer systems to understand human language at Google Research India. "The new approach we developed in India is called Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (or ‘MuRIL'). MuRIL currently supports 16 Indian languages as well as English," Google informed. Google said it has now made MuRIL open source, and it is currently available to download for free from the TensorFlow Hub. "We hope MuRIL will be the next big evolution for Indian language understanding, forming a better foundation for researchers, students, startups, and anyone else interested in building Indian language technologies," Google noted. WATCH | Google’s Task Mate Pays You To Complete Simple Tasks On Your Smartphone