Google Research Blog
The latest news from Research at Google
Word of Mouth: Introducing Voice Search for Indonesian, Malaysian and Latin American Spanish
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Posted by Linne Ha, International Program Manager
Read more about the launch of Voice Search in Latin American Spanish on the Google América Latina blog.
Today we are excited to announce the launch of Voice Search in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Latin American Spanish, making Voice Search available in over two dozen languages and accents since our first launch in November 2008. This accomplishment could not have been possible without the help of local users in the region - really, we couldn’t have done it without them. Let me explain:
In 2010 we launched Voice Search in Dutch, the first language where we used the “word of mouth” project, a crowd-sourcing effort to collect the most accurate voice data possible.The traditional method of acquiring voice samples is to license the data from companies who specialize in the distribution of speech and text databases. However, from day one we knew that to build the most accurate Voice Search acoustic models possible, the best data would come from the people who would use Voice Search once it launched - our users.
Since then, in each country, we found small groups of people who were avid fans of Google products and were part of a large social network, either in local communities or on online. We gave them phones and asked them to get voice samples from their friends and family. Everyone was required to sign a consent form and all voice samples were anonymized. When possible, they also helped to test early versions of Voice Search as the product got closer to launch.
Building a speech recognizer is not just limited to localizing the user interface. We require thousands of hours of raw data to capture regional accents and idiomatic speech in all sorts of recording environments to mimic daily life use cases. For instance, when developing Voice Search for Latin American Spanish, we paid particular attention to Mexican and Argentinean Spanish. These two accents are more different from one another than any other pair of widely-used accents in all of South and Central America. Samples collected in these countries were very important bookends for building a version of Voice Search that would work across the whole of Latin America. We also chose key countries such as Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia to bridge the divergent accent varieties.
As an International Program Manager at Google, I have been fortunate enough to travel around the world and meet many of our local Google users. They often have great suggestions for the products that they love, and word of mouth was created with the vision that our users could participate in developing the product. These Voice Search launches would not have been possible without the help of our users, and we’re excited to be able to work together on the product development with the people who will ultimately use our products.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
Android
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Audio
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
Awards
Cantonese
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Exacycle
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Genomics
Gmail
Google Books
Google Drive
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
KDD
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Translation
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
ML
MOOC
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
ph.d. fellowship
PiLab
Policy
Professional Development
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum Computing
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Software
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Systems
TensorFlow
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
User Experience
video
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
YouTube
Archive
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleresearch
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
