Google launches Voice Search in underrepresented languages

Google has launched Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents the company's first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages. Google defines underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.