Transliteration goes global

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Most of us use a keyboard to enter text; it's one of the most basic activities we perform on a computer. However even this simple activity can be cumbersome in many parts of the world. If you've ever tried to type in a non-Roman script using a Roman keyboard, you know that it can be difficult to do. Many of us at Google's Bangalore office experienced this problem firsthand. Roman keyboards are the norm in India, making it difficult to type in Indian languages. We decided to tackle this problem by making it very easy to type phonetically using Roman characters and we launched this service as Google Transliteration.

Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as: , typing "salaam" transliterates into Persian as: and typing "spasibo" transliterates into Russian as . Since our initial launch for a single Indian language, we've been hard at work on improving quality, adding more languages and new features.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs or at http://www.google.com/transliterate.

In this new version, you can select from one of seventeen supported languages: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi,Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a unicode character picker to allow character-by-character composition.

Google Transliteration is integrated into several Google properties and we have an API and bookmarklets to extend this capability to other websites. A solution we initially built to solve a problem we saw here in India is now being used in many other parts of the world as well - one small example of the scale and leverage that technology can bring in today's increasingly globalized environment. As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do let us know what you think.


Posted by Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

Email in Indian languages

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(cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

It's hard for me to imagine going without email for a day. It's such an easy and convenient way to communicate with my friends and family. However, there was one limitation that bothered me: my family members and friends who prefer to communicate in Hindi did not have an easy way to type and send email in their language of choice. I am therefore extremely happy to announce the launch of a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type email in Indian languages.

When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character, as the screenshot below shows. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the "Settings" page and enable this option in the "Language" section.

When you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example, if a Hindi speaker types "namaste" we will transliterate this to "नमस्ते." Similarly, "vanakkam" in Tamil will become "வணக்கம்." We currently support five Indian languages -- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam -- and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.

We built this new feature using Google's transliteration technology, which is also available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle. I hope you find this feature useful to communicate with those of your friends and family who prefer to write in their native language, and it will be available soon to businesses and schools using Google Apps. Now back to replying to all those Hindi emails I got from my family and friends today!

Posted by Chandramouli Mahadevan, Software Engineer

Designing a mobile friendly website

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As discussed in the first blogpost in this series, there are several steps involved and issues to keep in mind while designing mobile-friendly websites. One should always start with the user, and that's what we do here - in this post, we look at how to design the user experience for a mobile-friendly site.

Its a different world / Know thy user

A mobile user is completely different from someone who accesses information from a desktop. A mobile user wants to check email in a bus, view friends' photographs waiting in a line, wants to find out stock quotes any time anywhere and is looking for help when lost in an unknown place. A mobile phone too is completely different from a PC - it does not have a large monitor, completely usable keyboard and a fast broadband connection like a PC.

Fig 1: The world of mobile phones is very diverse

Screen-size makes or breaks the experience

As mentioned earlier size of the screen and the keyboard are one of the biggest constraints to be kept in mind while designing websites for a mobile phone. Do not make the website for just one screen size and one kind of keyboard. Make it generic or carefully choose a handful of common target screen sizes of your users. The screen size on mobile phones today ranges from 176x208 to 320x480. Add to this different dpi ,orientation and browsers and it makes the world of mobile devices very diverse. But here's the bright side: a mobile phone user normally only wants to do the one or two things frequently on your website. Keep the primary features and information in mind and make it very easy for the user to discover them and use them.

Fig 2: The most common screen sizes and orientations

Typing is painful

Don't make the users type a lot because even on the smartest of phones typing is not as easy as on a desktop. Make the site more click based. If the primary use cases demand keyboard input from the user, give auto suggest as the user types and have incremental search for items wherever possible.

Up & down is better than sideways

Keep the site contents as vertical as possible. Expanding the site horizontally results in bad user experience while scrolling back and forth. Also some older phones only allow vertical scrolling. Also repeating the header contents in the bottom of the page is a good idea since it makes it easier for the user to switch to a different use case instantly without scrolling a lot.

GPRS is slow, unsteady and costly

In terms of quality and cost to the user, GPRS has a lot to catch up in comparison to the normal broadband internet connections. Unlimited data connections are still not available everywhere. 3G networks are still a dream for many countries. And many of the cheaper data plans have high loss rate and exceptionally high latencies for SSL connections. Keeping all these considerations in mind, the website should not have too many images and data. It should maintain the right balance between richness and latency depending on which device the user is using.

Having thought about user experience, we're now in a position to explore technologies that will help implement our design. In subsequent posts, we'll look at mobile markup languages, compression & transcoding, and javascript & ajax among other technologies that will enable us to build the user experience we've designed.

Posted By: Chunky Gupta, Software Engineer & Ram Brijesh, User Experience Expert, Google