An easier way to type in Hindi and 10 other Indian languages
Fast forward to today's touchscreen age, and it's clear that technology has come a long way from the days of the humble typewriter. However until recently, our keyboards remained largely the same. This is a daily frustration for the nearly one billion people around the world who speak Indian languages and want to type in them. To help make things a little easier, we developed a keyboard that lets you input Hindi—and ten other Indian languages—with your phone or tablet more easily.
Once you've downloaded the Google Indic Keyboard from the Play store and enabled Hindi keyboard in your settings, select the Hindi tab to switch to the Hindi keyboard.
Tapping on the tab a second time will give you a way to select either the Hindi keyboard, a transliteration keyboard, or handwriting input which recognizes both Devanagari—the alphabet used for Hindi—and Latin characters.
Hindi's complexity and the variety in the ways people communicate posed a number of challenges when developing the keyboard. For example, a single Hindi word can have multiple English-alphabet variations. The popular boy’s name, "आदित्य"" in Devanagari, can be input as “Aditya,” “Aaditya” or “Adhitya”. We also had to find a way to fit Hindi's 12 vowels and 36 consonants into a standard, ~40 character keyboard.
What’s more, it's very common to communicate and type in “Hinglish”—a mix of English and Hindi written in the English alphabet. This is why we built the Hindi keyboard in a way that gives people a range of options. So now when you’re in English mode, you can type in Hinglish and get suggestions for Hinglish and English.
The Google Indic Keyboard app has been downloaded over 10 million times. By making mobile input easier for almost one billion speakers of Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu, we also hope to see more engaging content in these languages on the web.
