The move is part of Google's plan to get the next billion users aboard, which it believes will majorly be non-English speaking.
In its attempt to get the next billion users onboard, Google is pushing ahead with localising its products for the Indian market. The search giant believes the next wave of users are not English speakers. Local language support is now present in most of its apps, including the Google Assistant which can now speak in Hindi. Now, Google announced it has added offline translation and Instant Camera Translation for seven Indian languages.
The languages includes Bengali, Gujrati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu. The offline translation feature allows users to download a 30MB (roughly) file which can translate from English even if there’s no data connection. It is an useful feature in areas where connectivity is poor.
While offline translation still requires users to type out the sentences, Instant Camera Translation requires users to just point the camera at the text they want translated. Although, the instant translation from the camera app only works when the text is in English while offline.
You can download the files for offline translation from the Google Translate app. The file size ranges from 28-30 MB.
Google has also made an effort to localise other offerings like Google Maps, Google Assistant, and more. The company recently announced support for Indic languages in Google Maps navigation while the Google Keyboard allows transliteration in Indic languages. Even Google Assistant has been localised for phones, with the option for the Assistant to speak and understand Hindi.
Google also launched Android Oreo (Go Edition) for phones with less powerful hardware. The lightweight operating system is optimised for phones with less than 1GB of RAM and is aimed primarily to encourgae feature phone users to switch to a smartphone without an exorbitant increase in price.
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