NEW DELHI: Starting Monday, Google will understand eight Additional Indian Languages. The search giant has added Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu to its Voice search and voice typing (speech to text) capability.

Before this, these services were available in Hindi and English among Indian Languages. Globally, 22 other languages were also added to Google’s voice search and voice typing on Monday, including Swahili and Armenian.

Speaking to the press via video conference, Google’s technical program manager Daan van Esch, said the 20% of all searches on Android are via voice.

The text-to-speech function uses machine learning to train its systems. The more voice samples it has, the more accurate it gets. In building the current Indian language speech recognition function, Esch said background noise was a unique challenge. Getting Indian language voice samples from India, he said, meant a lot more street sounds. While the same from Indian Googlers from other parts of the world, had a lot less noise. “We had to make voice samples robust to background noises. Machine learning needs to adapt to the local country,” said Esch.

The additional Indian languages will first be available on Android phones, and will roll out to iOS after.