SwiftKey, one of the most popular keyboard app for smartphones, introduced support for 7 new languages at an event in Delhi. The company especially emphasized that the app now supports Tamil transliteration. Other languages like Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Telugu and Kannada are also available, but they are in beta and will roll out later in 2017.
Now, SwiftKey supports 22 Indian languages now that makes it a truly adaptive keyboard reliable for Indian users. SwiftKey users will now be able to write Tamil without changing keyboard language with the help of the new transliteration feature. Users just have to type the word out, and the AI will recognize the word and suggest corresponding Tamil words to replace the typed word.
As an example, if a Hindi and Tamil user types ‘namaskar’ the prediction bar will come up with ‘namaskar’, “நமஸ்காரம்” and “नमस्कार”.
Aarti Samani, tech evangelist for SwiftKey India said: “Mixed language vocabulary is a naturally occurring phenomenon in our country, yet historically mobile users have been let down by having to use QWERTY keyboards not designed to allow them to type as they speak and think. The upshot is that many people avoid using certain letters and matras from their mother language.”
She further said, “A large proportion of users abandon using the native script altogether. Multi-script transliteration solves this problem. It is crucial to advancing the adoption of new communication technologies within India, while still encouraging linguistic richness and diversity, and thus helping to preserve the sense of identity, culture and tradition that is inexorably tied to native language usage.”
Download link: Swiftkey for Android
