Google Gboard now recognizes 5 Philippine languages

MANILA, Philippines — The smart keyboard developed by technology giant Google will now be able to recognize five Philippine languages, the company said yesterday.

Google said the latest update of Gboard includes support for Central Bicolano, the fifth Philippine language after Filipino, Hiligaynon, Kapampangan and Ilokano.

“With today’s update, we’ve added support for Bicol and over 20 other new language varieties, including several Indian languages, Chinese, Korean and African languages like Fulani,” said Gboard technical program manager Daan van Esch in a statement.

“Gboard on Android now supports 300 language varieties, covering over 70 percent of the world’s population. This includes Filipino, Hiligaynon, Kapampangan and Ilokano,” he added.

Van Esch said they are working towards bringing Gboard to more people worldwide by introducing more languages, unique scripts, native layouts and transliterated layouts to the keyboard.

Gboard is powered by machine learning technology to improve its language recognition capability. 

It also has the Google Search and Translate capabilities built in to enable users to have immediate access to the company’s other services.

“We use language samples from the web and work closely with native speakers in the Philippines to collect data to train our machine learning models,” said Google.

“These models then analyze the data to find common patterns in phrases and sentences, powering Gboard’s next-word prediction and auto-correction,” it added.