Internet search giant Google has released a mobile voice search application, available in three South African languages: English, Afrikaans and Zulu.
Voice Search allows users to search the Web by speaking their queries into their cellular phones instead of having to type out the request.
The feature will be available on Android and iPhone devices, including LG's latest handset, the Optimus One, which will be unveiled locally this week.
“Voice Search uses Google's speech recognition technology to run a search on Google, just as if the query had been typed by hand,” says Julie Taylor, Google communications manager for Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Voice has always been the most natural way to interact with a phone, since speaking is typically faster than typing.”
For each language, Google constructs a vocabulary of over one million recognisable words. The application is available in 16 languages worldwide, but the company notes that it has not been without hiccups.
Google's voice engineering is being led by South African born Johann Schalkwyk, a senior Google staff engineer, based in New York.
“We follow a rigorous process to add each new language or dialect,” explains Schalkwyk. “We work directly with native language speakers in each country, to develop the specific models which power the service.
“One of the challenges that we faced was the paucity of content on the Web in Zulu, in comparison to other languages that we have developed,” adds Schalkwyk.
“As a result, Voice Search in Zulu is a work in progress. Improvement will come from content creation efforts in Zulu and from Zulu speakers using Voice Search.”
Big plans
On the first day of the Google Developers' Conference in SA, in Cape Town, Google engineering VP for EMEA Nelson Mattos and a range of Google's engineering staff demonstrated the US search engine giant's strategy for Africa.
This is the first such event Google has hosted in SA and, Mattos says, is one of 40 similar gatherings it has held across the continent this year. Such interactions with the developer community are expected to increase substantially over the next 12 months, he notes.
“Our strategy is based on making the Internet accessible and relevant, otherwise it means nothing.”
Mattos gave a brief synopsis of Goggle's advance into Africa. It has captured more than 1.1 million kilometres of streets on its Street View and Google Maps applications, which means more than 300 cities are covered and over 50% of Africa's 300 million people.
He says YouTube began to be hosted in SA for the first time in May in preparation for the 2010 Soccer World Cup as part of an effort to improve the user experience.
“Africa doesn't have a lot of local domains, but Google's sites means it is getting easier to create more African domains,” he comments.
Robert Hamilton, Google mobile product manager, says mobile phone penetration in Africa is increasing, with more than 16% of the South African cellular base of about 50 million users possessing a cellphone.
He predicts Google's smartphone operating system will have 80% penetration of the African market by 2014.
“There are more than 200 000 Android phones being activated worldwide every day. The prices for these smartphones are falling all the time and now we are doing voice search in SA using English, Afrikaans and Zulu.”
The South African languages are being developed with South African ICT research centre, the Meraka Institute, which sent an intern to work with Schalkwyk in New York for three months.
Etienne Barnard, a chief researcher at the Meraka Institute, told the conference that SA offered a unique opportunity to study and develop for languages that may be considered marginalised.
“English is an international language and so it is taken care of. Afrikaans is a Germanic language, but it has plenty of resources; however, Zulu has next to nothing in terms of Internet resources,” he noted.
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