Along with announcements on GNMT’s Indian language debut and Chrome extension, Google also brought in support for 22 Indian languages on its native Android keyboard — the Gboard.
The new Gboard also comes with transliteration support for Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and Gujarati. For users who often switch back and forth between Hindi and English, they will also be able to use Hinglish language option with new text editing tool that makes it easier to select, copy and paste, plus new options for resizing and repositioning the keyboard so it fits into the hand and texting style.
Indians who speak Hindi as their native tongue, are extremely habitual of using hindi in english (popularly called ‘Hinglish’) to send messages and communicate on IM apps and social media. Almost all the times, either the words go unrecognised by Gboard and get auto-corrected (urghh that frustration!) or have to be added to the dictionary to avoid the pains arising from the former. That will chage with this new Hinglish feature.
Like Google Indic Keyboard, Gboard offers auto-correction and prediction in these new languages, plus two layouts for each—one in the native language script and one with the QWERTY layout for transliteration, which lets users spell words phonetically using the QWERTY alphabet and get text output in their native language script. For example, type “aapko holi ki hardik shubhkamnay” and get “आपको होली की हार्दिक शुभकामनायें ”.
Hindi Dicitionary on Gboard
Bringing dictionary functionality on Google search for users, Google will now offer Hindi dictionary results from Rajpal & Sons dictionary in collaboration with the Oxford University Press. This new experience will also supports transliteration, allowing users to use their existing keyboard to find meanings in hindi. So when you’d like to know more about a word, say “Nirdeshak”, you can just type in “Nirdeshak ka matlab” in Search, and you’ll instantly get to see word meanings and dictionary definitions on the search results page, including English translations.
