Microsoft’s Initiatives for Local Language Support for India
New Delhi, India, December 16, 2015: Indian language experience is available in Bing.com both on Desktop and Mobile devices. Indian users can use Bing in their native languages as it supports 9 Indian languages viz. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati and Punjabi.
A virtual onscreen keyboard helps users in typing their preferred language without requiring additional keyboard installations. Users can also easily toggle between English and their native language by simply clicking on the keyboard icon in Bing search bar or closing the onscreen virtual keyboard.
The Bing native language experience is intuitive – as a user types, Bing provides search suggestions in Indian languages helping the user to complete the task quickly. These search suggestions are an aggregation of user searches across Bing.
While searching for information about entities like celebrity, place, movie, organization, etc. apart from web results Bing shows rich entity information snapshot addressing the users’ top needs. Currently, this experience is available in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu.
Bing has built a scalable Indian language content generation pipeline to convert content from English to Indian languages. The pipeline uses a mix of transliteration and existing translations available in Microsoft’s Satori Knowledge Base. Content generated by this pipeline powers search suggestions, mini answers, information snapshot, and necessary query triggers to surface rich Indian language experiences. In future this shall be made available for broader use.
Bing support for Indian languages augments Windows 10 phones, which natively supports text input in multiple Indian languages. All Indian language experiences in Bing are available on Android devices too.
Project Bhasha is a key milestone in Microsoft’s effort to stimulate local language computing and take IT to the masses, driven by the fact that 95 percent of Indians use their local language rather than English in their work and personal life. Being a comprehensive program, it aims to localize (provide local interfaces) to Microsoft’s flagship products, Windows and Office.
Bhasha is a cohesive program for bringing together the governments, the academia and the research institutions, the local ISVs and developers and the industry associations on a common ground for promoting local language computing. Aimed at accelerating local language computing in India wherein, Microsoft is primarily focusing its efforts along four key areas: Product localization, Government collaboration, Academia & Developer Integration and Common platform www.bhashaindia.com
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