Google adds new language features for Indian users

Today Google announced four new language features at its L10n event in India. The new features add support for more Indian languages across various Google products. Google announced its new multilingual "MuRIL" model developed in India.

Google Search India displays results in both English and Hindi. Users can switch between the two languages for search queries with just one tap. Google said this had seen a 10-fold increase in Hindi queries in India. Google is now adding support for four more Indian languages: Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, and Marathi.

In India Google Search will also start showing results in more languages. This will work for local language inquiries written in English and is also intended to benefit bilingual users who prefer to read articles in both English and an Indian language. The new update will start showing during the next month and in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

Google is also making it easy for users to change their preferred language in Google Assistant and Discover. Users can do this by going into the application settings and selecting their preferred language. Google said that a third of Assistant users in India use the app in an Indian language, and more than 50% of users view Discover content in Indian languages.

Google Lens is getting a cool feature called "Homework" that can solve mathematics questions. This feature comes in Hindi and English also. All users need to do snap a photo of a math problem with Google Lens, and it will show step-by-step procedures and videos that explain the problem.

MuRIL

MuRIL is the acronym for Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages. This latest multilingual model can understand and interpret Hindi text written in Roman script better than previous models. According to Google India, the phrase "Achha hua account bandh nahi hua" would have previously been interpreted as negative, but MuRIL can identify this as a positive statement.

MuRIL is free and open-source on TensorFlow Hub that supports 16 Indian and English languages.