Android Now Supports Hindi Input Courtesy Of Google Hindi App

Google India has announced on its official blog that they have now launched a Google Hindi input app for Android thus making it super easy for the already dominant OS to penetrate deeper into the Indian heartland. This will make the mobile platform very accessible for Hindi speakers and they can thus communicate clearly with other Hindi speaking people rather than using English characters to express themselves.

Once you download the Google Hindi app from Google Play,  it integrates with the system wide keyboard on Android and gives an option for you to select Hindi. The Hindi input works in two different ways.

If you are a Hindi speaker but find it taxing to type in pure Devanagari characters, you can use the transliteration option. Using this you can just input a regular Hindi word in English characters and it will be converted to Devanagari script.

The second option is to use Devanagari characters right from the keyboard. This requires you be fluent in the word and sentence construction. Since keyboards are made primarily for English, it is a bit of a challenge to implement the various nuances of Devanagari or any other unique script for that matter. For Devanagari, the keyboard offers special long press actions which get you the right character of your choice. Google has said that even though Hindi is the first Indic language to be supported on Android, they will be making efforts to include other languages and dialects over the course of time.

This is brilliant as it gets more regional users to get easy access to smartphones and ultimately the web. This gives Indian web companies a clear advantage as their userbase will keep growing. I would suggest that web and mobile companies pay greater attention to regional language speakers because these are the guys who will ultimately drive the sector to new lengths.

Note: Android doesn’t support Hindi by default and this app requires that your manufacturer has enabled Devanagari font support on your phone failing which the app won’t work as shown. 

Story Source | Google India Blog

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