Google announced Wednesday that it has extended beta support for Hindi handwriting giving users a new way to use their Android smartphones with India's national language.
Google Inc., world's largest search engine, announced beta support for Hindi handwriting in a bid to please more than 300 million Indian online users.
Users can now switch to India's national language on Android devices making the Internet usage in Hindi as easy as using the language offline. The new software allows users to type and search queries on Google by scribbling words in Hindi as the new software will recognize them and run a search.
Google found that less than 10 percent of Internet usage was in Indian languages, but the remaining 90 percent of newspaper readers or television viewers in the real world used their respective mother tongues. India is a multi lingual country, but Hindi is recognized as the national language. There are several hundred languages spoken across 28 states and 7 union territories of the country.
"We believe you should be able to use the internet in Hindi as easily as you read and write today. No matter what kind of handwriting you have, Google can help you find exactly what you're looking for - so here's to Handwrite in Hindi, we hope you have as much fun using it as we did creating it!" Lalitesh Katragadda, Head of Product for India and Kapil Khosla, Technical Program Manager, wrote in the company's blog.
The company said that the new feature was jointly developed by the software teams in Zurich, Mountain View and Bangalore.
Google explained to its Android users how to activate and use the new language on their devices. In order to enable the feature on mobile Google search, users must go to page settings and enable the Handwrite option and change the language of Google "products" and "search results" to Hindi. Then, by tapping the Handwrite icon (g) on the bottom right hand side, users can start scribbling words in Hindi anywhere on the screen and Google will recognize them to perform a search query.
Similarly, if users wish to use the feature on Google Chrome on PC or laptop they must install an extension and activate it. Once activated, the trackpad will be used as a writing pad for users to write in Hindi.
In addition, the new tool also works with Google Translate app available in Google Play Store.
