Google Voice Search Now Supports 13 More Languages

Google Voice search for Android now supports an additional 13 languages. The world’s largest search giant announced on Friday that it was adding the new voice support to the 29 languages already featured on the platform. Google Voice now supports 42 languages and accents in 46 countries.

With the release of the new language and accent support, Google now believes that the Android Voice Search platform can reach 100 million new speakers. The new language support is meant to mostly target users living in Europe.

Adding new language support wasn’t as easy for Google as it had been in the past. While Google could easily implement volunteer-based mass-soundbyte collection processes for some languages, they had to rely on a new system all together for others. For example, Romanian uses predictable rules for pronunciation while Swedish does not.

To create the new language support ,Google hired native speakers and then built a new machine learning system around how they spoke, thus predicting how other words within the language would sound.

The Google Android Voice Search will now learn from its mistakes, using user inputted requests to fine tune its system and become more accurate.

Google Voice now includes the following new languages: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, and the previously mentioned Swedish.

Google Android 2.2 users or later will have the added functionality immediately through the Google Search widget. Older Android version users can download and install the Voice Search App via the Google Play store for free.