Google has launched its new Hindi Input App, proving yet again that its interest in building a large following in the Indian smartphone marketplace has yet to wane.
The Hindi Input App, launched by Google's Internationalization Team, lets Android users in India (or elsewhere) more easily communicate with each other in Hindi via their phones. As opposed to having to employ English characters, Android users can now use the Hindi Input App to communicate with one another via Devanagari script.
"Hindi is spoken by hundreds of millions of people in India and around the world. But reconciling the breadth and complexity of the Devanagari script and the limitations of a QWERTY keyboard can be a barrier to communication, particularly on mobile devices," Google India says on its blog.
There are two options available to users of the Hindi Input App. The first involves the transliteration option, in which a regular Hindi word can be input with English characters, with the word then being converted to Devanagari script.
The second option is using Devanagari characters straight from the keyboard. Users of this option must be fluent in both word and sentence structure.
With keyboards being made for English "it is a bit of a challenge to implement the various nuances of Devanagari or any other unique script for that matter," Before It's News says.
Unique long press actions that allow for the right Devanagari character to be chosen are also a part of Google's latest app release.
Twenty-one other languages have previously been integrated into Google's Input Tools for Windows, including: Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Persian, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu.
"Google Hindi Input is the first Indic language input method on Android, but definitely not the last from the Google Internationalization team - stay tuned for more," Google writes on its blog.
The Hindi Input App can be purchased through Google Play and has, at the time of this writing, received 547 reviews.
"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," notes Before It's News.
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