Andre Yoskowitz
6 Dec 2011 12:57
Google has announced today that their Voice Search feature in Android and iOS has now added Arabic and Hebrew support.
Thanks to the update, Voice Search now supports 29 languages in 37 countries.
Users in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, UAE, and Israel now have access.
Says Google:
When building support for Arabic and Hebrew into our language model we faced some unique challenges, including how to understand words with diacritics (accents that indicate a difference in pronunciation, a linguistic phenomenon called "Nikud" in Hebrew, and "Tashkil" in Arabic) and words appended with other words ("and" for example) that can have many different nuanced meanings.
To train our system we collected over one million utterances in Arabic and Hebrew, using the languages as they are spoken in the more populated parts of each country. For Arabic, we trained the system to recognize Gulf, Levant and Egyptian dialects. While initially we may not accurately recognize words spoken in every regional accent and dialect, one of the major benefits to Google's cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.