Google Project Relate to expand speech recognition for impaired voices to Hindi next year

Google is bringing Project Relate, an initiative to identify and aid impaired voice and speeches, to Hindi next year. The initiative, which was first unveiled at Google I/O 2019 under the name Project Euphonia, seeks to aid users who have speech disabilities, and are therefore impaired from communicating. The project, according to Elizabeth Reid, vice-president of Search at Google, will help the company expand its database of understanding a wider range of voice information.

The project is presently a pilot venture, and will progress with an increasing amount of data that is collected from users selected in the trial phase.

The project is part of Google’s initiatives that expand its range of offerings in languages and formats outside English. A key unveiling in this space includes bilingual Search pages, which will see results on Google’s search engine being offered in a mix of English and Hindi, to begin with. The feature will be subsequently rolled out to four other languages — Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bangla, in the coming months.

During a media roundtable, Reid said that Google has noted considerable progress in a wide range of AI applications beyond English.

“If you look at the way AI models have progressed, AI models and data sets beyond English have improved significantly over the past three years. For instance, today, our search engine can recognise a query in a mixed language format, which was not possible a few years ago. While this shows an improvement in leaps in how AI works for non-English languages, there is of course a long way to go as well,” Reid said.

To diversify its data set, Google also announced Project Vaani — a move that will see the company collect “language information” from across 773 districts around India.

“There are fine differences between accents and dialects. AI has gotten better in recognising these, but there is a long way to go too. That is what our new initiatives will offer,” she said.