Google has updated its text-to-speech service to now support over 30 additional languages. Most of these belong to developing countries and further strengthen Google’s push in those areas off late. India’s Marathi, Bengali, Kannada and Malayalam are supported along with other popular languages in the Asia-Pacific region such as Urdu, Nepali and Sinhala. The support will also be extended to cover Google’s Cloud API that allow Google’s own services and other third party developer to use Google’s services for text-to-speech synthesis.
Google’s efforts in this area have been commendable as the services already had support for 89 languages prior to today’s updates. Among these diverse languages is also included support for different dialects, for instance along with the American version, Australian, Canadian, Indian and UK English were also supported. Today’s update adds support for English in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania.
Several tech-companies have been making a push to expand their services with a focus on the developing market off late. The addition of offline mode, lite-app versions and support for local currencies, content and languages have been among the chief aspects in this regard. The complete list of languages added as part of this update can be viewed at TechCrunch whereas the full list of 119 languages supported by Google’s Cloud API can be found on the official website. As new languages are added, the list will be updated by the search giant.