Even though there is plenty of Indian language content available online, it's not easy to search them. That's because it's difficult to key in the search words in an Indian language, as most computer and mobile phone keyboards are in English. The only way is to use the translation feature to get the Indic script and paste it in the Search box.
That is all set to change, with the launch of Google Handwrite, which will recognise the Hindi script for search and translate. On Android phones and Chrome web browser, users can now write words or sentences in Hindi script using their finger or stylus on the touchscreen of an Android phone or tablet, for searching the web or translating. The feature seems to work well. For example, the word aam aadmi was correctly translated as 'common people' and not 'mango people' .
The Hindi handwrite features have been a collaboration between teams across Zurich, Mountain View and Bangalore.
To get started, go to www.google. co.in in your mobile browser; tap on "Settings" at the bottom of the screen, go to Search Settings and enable "Handwrite." Change language in Google products to Hindi. Also add "Hindi" as a Language of Search Results . You may have to refresh the home page for the change to take effect . On tablets, the Search settings are available as an option behind the gear icon. Tap the Handwrite icon on the bottom right corner of your screen to activate the feature. Write a few letters and you'll see autocomplete options appear below the search box. If one of the options is what you're looking for, just tap it to search.
For translation, in the Google Translate app, change the language from the drop-down settings you want to translate from and to. Enter the Hindi text you want to translate using the Handwriting tool. You will then be able to see the translated results.
"The amount of Indic text content usage on web browsers is less than 10% compared to English," said Lalitesh Katragadda, head of products, Google India. "But for visual medium , more than half of non-Bollywood content is in Indic languages. This is despite the need for bigger bandwidth for services like YouTube. This shows there is huge demand for Indic on internet. We believe there is such a low usage of text content because there is no way to do it; and that's why we have brought in this Handwrite feature."
He said far fewer text content in Indic is created on the web compared to the number of Indic videos uploaded on YouTube. We want to bridge this divide. This is one way of creating a vibrant Indic internet, he said.
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