Google is continuing to tailor its search engine and other online tools for the SA market, on Friday announcing its mobile voice search facility is now also available in Zulu and Afrikaans, in addition to English.

The service, available immediately, allows users to search the Web by speaking their queries into their phones.

The feature will be available on Android devices and Apple’s iPhone.

“Voice search uses Google’s speech recognition technology to run a search on Google, just as if the query had been typed by hand,” says Julie Taylor, Google communications manager for sub-Saharan Africa.

“We follow a rigorous process to add each new language or dialect,” says Johan Schalkwyk, senior staff engineer at Google in New York. “We work directly with native language speakers in each country, to develop the specific models which power the service.

“In SA, our helpers were asked to read popular queries in English, Zulu and Afrikaans in a variety of acoustic conditions, such as in restaurants, out on busy streets, and inside cars. For each language, we construct a vocabulary of over 1m recognisable words,” Schalwyk says.

“One of the challenges that we faced was the paucity of content on the Web in Zulu, in comparison to other languages that we have developed,” says Schalkwyk. “As a result, voice search in Zulu is a work in progress. Improvement will come from content creation efforts in Zulu and from Zulu speakers using voice search.”

The CSIR’s Meraka Institute and the North West University assisted Google with research.

Google now offers voice search in 16 languages worldwide. — Staff reporter, TechCentral