Ever since I was a kid, I found it fascinating that you could dictate actions to your PC via voice commands. That feature soon found its way to smartphones and today, most if not all of our tasks can be carried out by a simple voice command. From setting an alarm, to playing a song, to navigating to your favorite restaurant, all of this can be done without ever needed to type anything on your phone.
In fact, according to a paper published at Stanford University, using your voice to dictate a message can be three times faster than typing. If you think about it, this actually makes sense, and from personal experience, I can relate that voice typing and voice commands indeed have made life easier. Google’s latest addition to voice input or voice typing was Google Keyboard, now simply known as GBoard. Users could type entire messages and even reply to messages using only their voice. While this was an entirely new way to interact with your phone, it still lacked support or had limited support for languages such as Sinhala and Tamil.
In the most recent update, Google Speech updated voice typing by adding 30 languages and locales around the world, bringing the support for Google speech recognition to a total of 119 language varieties in GBoard for Android, Voice Search and a plethora of Google services. In addition to this, US English users can actually use voice dictation to express themselves with emoji. Simply say “winky face” and the “;)” emoji will be added to your message.
Image Credits: TechJuice
That’s not all though. Among the languages that were added are Sinhala and Tamil (India, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Malaysia). According to Google, they’ve worked with native speakers to collect speech samples by asking them to read common phrases. These were then fed to Google’s machine learning models to work out the sounds and words of the newly added languages and also to improve their accuracy when subjected to more phrases over time.
Image Credits: Mahesh de Andrado
The new languages will be made available in Google’s Cloud Speech API and will be made available to other Google products such as Google Translate. Currently, Voice typing works for GBoard in Sinhala and the Google app is quite fast in identifying the phrases I read out. I couldn’t seem to get ti to work with Google Assistant directly but Google Search worked fine. Granted, the results are not exactly what you would expect. Given the fact that the app understands what you’re saying, it won’t be too long before we’ll be able to translate what we’re saying in Sinhala to English in real time and even perhaps get navigation instructions in Sinhala as well.
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I still don’t see Sinhala as a language option on my Gboard on iPhone.
same here 🙁
you have to switch to english language and then select sinhla as a separate language. ( switch of the automatic language selection)
you should have a smart phone with anroyed OS5
go to your gboard language setting and checked Sinhala as your gboard language but no need to change your system language.
Same here too
Use Helakuru on iPhone, it is a Sri Lankan product and it works great in iPhone
Eka hariyata 5s eke wada na! Helakuru enable karapuwama, keyboard change krddi lag wenwa, samahara welwta keyboard eka enneth na🤢! Ita passe thama Gboard dagatthe…
me too
still don’t see Sinhala as a language option on my Gboard on iPhone.
Buy an Android!
I need
Same here too..?
They have not updated this on the AppStore it seems for the iOS version … Very sad
Same here too
My Android also not work with sinhala. Still I m trying
Cloud Speech doesn’t recognize Helakuru or any other Sinhala fonts.
Good approach
Sinhala isnt work in samsung j3?? how to fix
It is working man tanks
Fine this usfull
It is not available Sinhala Font on Samsung j1. How to fix it?
ෆෝන් එකේ language එක සිංහල කරන්න එතකොට පුළුවන්
Yeah folks sad news for iOS users
It’s working good . Great for my IPhone 6
I like
Why Gboard sinhala didnt display on my android phone
How do I install in I phone 7 please help
Its not working for my iPhone 6. What should i do?
Mage eke sinhalen kiwata sinhalen type wennaa.kohomada eka hadanne
It’s for sure, sinhala voice conversation is not updated for iOS
Mahesh, is there a PC version for the app?