Thursday, 22 August 2013
Today, Google announced beta support for Hindi handwriting and ability to switch to a native Hindi experience for Android. These are baby steps to make the Hindi internet simpler to use, the Internet giant claims. The new feature allows users to type in Hindi on a touchscreen, using fingers/a stylus after which it recognises the characters on its own.
"We believe you should be able to use the internet in Hindi as easily as you read and write today. No matter what kind of handwriting you have, Google can help you find exactly what you’re looking for — so here’s to Handwrite in Hindi, we hope you have as much fun using it as we did creating it!" the Google India blog said on Wednesday.
To use the function, users can go to google.com on their mobile browsers, tap on "Settings" at the bottom of the screen, go to Search Settings and enable "Handwrite", change the language in Google products to Hindi and add "Hindi" as a Language of Search Results.
Once the feature is enabled, the Handwrite icon at the bottom right corner of the screen can be tapped to activate the Handwrite mode. After writing a few letters, the autocomplete options appear below the search box.
This addresses more than 300 million Indian users on the Internet and comes a bid to make Internet searching easier for them, the search giant noted.
Handwrite is currently enabled for Android 2.3+ phones, Android 4.0+ tablets and for iOS5+ devices — in over 30 international languages. In addition, Android version Jelly Bean 4.3.can now purely be used in Hindi. Also recently, the leading smartphone giant Samsung has also added the similar interface support to 9 local languages including Hindi to its Galaxy smartphones and tablets.
