Google voice search to include Kikuyu, 15 more African languages

American multinational tech company Google has enhanced its products to better suit the African market.

Google Speech, in partnership with the research team based in Accra, Ghana, announced on October 29 the launch of Voice Search, talk-to-type on Gboard and voice input on Translate for 15 more African languages.

The newly listed languages enable dictation (voice input) across these products for over 300 million Africans to communicate with the web and their friends using just their voice.

“In East Africa, you can now voice type, search and translate in Oromo and Tigrinya alongside Amharic in Ethiopia, bringing voice input there to over 85 million people or around 70 per cent of the population. Google is also adding support for Somali and Rundi, major languages of Somalia and Burundi respectively,” the tech company notes in a statement to Habari Digital.

“Google is also expanding its offering on Voice Search and Gboard in Kenya with the addition of Kikuyu, alongside Swahili and Dholuo.”

In West Africa, the search engine now supports Twi, one of the most widely spoken languages in Ghana, as well as 4 major languages of Nigeria, a country with over 500 languages and 218 million people.

The statement adds: “Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin are spoken by an estimated 129 million people, or around 60 per cent of Nigeria’s population.”

These additions will bring the tech giant’s total to 25 languages with voice support in Africa – and 94 languages total across the world.

Voice input on Translate enables people to dictate to Translate and get translations in other languages – while talk-to-text support on Gboard and Voice Search allows people to type with voice anywhere where Gboard is enabled, or Search on Google using their voice.

 “With teams in Google Accra working on this, it’s one example of how Google in Africa is building technology for Africans – and for the world,” Google Africa Managing Director Alex Okosi said.

The tech company notes that these developments were made possible by the use of Artificial Intelligence, specifically multilingual speech recognition – which converts speech into text.

“The AI model learns languages in the way a child would- learning to associate certain speech sounds with the specific sequences of character in the written form. Multilingual speech recognition models are trained on data from multiple languages, and then are able to transcribe speech into text in any of those languages.”

Matt Brittin, President of Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa, was in the region for the announcement.

Speaking from Kenya and ahead of a visit to Nigeria, he said: “The next decade is set to be Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital decade – with more than half the population accessing the Internet for the first time. Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful – and extending Voice Search, voice typing on Gboard and voice input on Translate to 300 million people across Africa is a key landmark in that.”