Google Labs has launched a new page for it’s Indian counterpart where two tools have been listed for trial by the sub-continental users. Incidentally, Google Labs is the place where most of the experimental projects are posted by their engineers.
The hot new tools are…
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Indic On-Screen Keyboard (iGoogle Gadget) that allows one to perform searches in any of the (available) Indian languages.
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Google Indic Transliteration tool that converts any written text in English into Hindi (Devanāgarī characters), the moment you hit space. For example, if you type Google it gets auto-converted to गूगल.
If you’ve used Avro Keyboard earlier on for transliterating Bengali, you’ll know what I’m talking about - except that this works for Hindi. In case you don’t get your desired spelling, you can always click on a word to get a drop-down list of suggestions. In the word you’re seeking doesn’t exist in that list, you can always go ahead and edit it using a pop-up on-screen Indic keyboard. From what I saw this is going to serve as an excellent means for typing in Devanāgarī script for those who don’t want to go through the painstaking process of learning the Indic keyboard layout.
There are a couple of issue with font rendering though. The help page for iGoogle Gadgets, says..
Oriya font rendering seems to be broken under IE. Firefox does not seem to support Oriya at all. Bengali (and Assamese) fonts are often too tiny and seem to be placed a few pixels lower than required. Many browsers do not render some of the Malayalam chillus and conjuncts correctly.
Google seems to be finally catching up on offering truly localised services outside of the U.S.
Found via: Google Blogoscoped
University Update - Firefox - A whacking Google Indic Transliteration tool at the Google Labs, India page said:
[...] below to view the article on the author’s site. Article Information Provided by Technorati.comView Original Article at Chaos Laboratory » 10 Most Recent News Articles About [...]
tan said:
Interesting… They surely are catch up and would do that fast too! Tried to delve into it to some extent… Some of it is out there at my blog (http://windforwings.blogspot.com/2007/09/peek-into-google-labs-indic.html). Soon we’ll have some Google transliteration APIs, I’m sure.
miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG said:
tan: I took a look at your article and I must say that you got a damned good discussion going on there. Nice analysis of the transliteration engine.
To those who get to this article, you should take a look at tan’s post.
QuillPad - Taking English to Indic Transliteration one step ahead at Chaos Laboratory: Technology Reviews & Internet Technology News from the Web said:
[...] those who have read my earlier posts on Avro Keyboard and Google’s Inidc Transliteration service, here comes a pleasant surprise for you. Tachyon Technologies - an Indian software firm [...]
sid said:
http://www.quillpad.in is another good transliteration tool.
miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG said:
Yep !! And I’ve written a review on it quite sometime back. In some aspects it’s a far better tool that Google’s - specially it’s intelligent spelling guesser.
Cheers,
m^e