Google’s speech recognition technology has long enabled users to rely on its voice-to-text recognition feature. The feature now supports 30 additional languages. Google announced today that it’s bringing voice typing to 30 more languages across the globe, covering more than a billion people. The latest update brings up the total number of supported languages to 119.
Google’s speech recognition technology can be found in Gboard on Android, Voice Search, and more. Users in the United States can also use voice dictation to express themselves in emoji.
In order to honor languages across the globe, speech recognition now even supports ancient languages such as Georgian that has alphabet dating back to the 10th century. Swahili and Amharic, the two most popular languages spoken in Africa, to the list as well. Many Indian languages have been added to the list too.
The full list of the newly supported languages can be found on Google’s website. It includes Armenian, Azerbaijani, Kannada, Khmer, Latvian, Nepali, and Urdu.
Google incorporated the 30 new language varieties by working with native speakers to collect speech samples. The process trained its machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and improve their accuracy over time.
All of these new languages will soon be available across other Google apps and products, including the Translate app.