Google Voice Search, available in Romanian and other 12 new languages

Google Voice Search, available until now in 29 languages, expanded, with 13 new languages – including Romanian -,  its support for Android users . As for now, Google Voice Search will be available in 42 languages and with accents in 46 countries, with over 100M new speakers able to use now Voice Search service.

The new added languages, besides Romanian, are Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Serbian, Slovak and Swedish.

Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced.

Bertrand Damiba

Product Manager

The updated support including 13 new languages already started to roll out and will continue to do so during next week. Androids 2.2 can use the mic icon available in Google Search, while others can install Voice Search app from Google Play.