Google India L10n Event: Google Maps Gets 9 Indian Languages, MuRIL Model Announced
17-December-2020

Google India held a special L10n event earlier today, with clear focus on the company's local language models. After the broader Google For India event earlier this year, the L10n (a term which itself means localisation) event focused on smaller optimisation to various products that Google India will be rolling out. At the centre of it was the announcement of MuRIL, Multilingual Representation for Indian Languages. MuRIL will help develop machine language models faster for local languages, therefore improving Search, Assistant and all other Google tools in a wide number of Indian languages. Also improved is Google Maps, which now officially gets operations in nine Indian languages instead of its basic Hindi direction narration feature. Google also rolled out contextual improvements to its image and voice search, and all things considered, Google should now be able to better recognise your speech, image or text, and suggest you native and bilingual search results for your local language queries.

And with that, it's a wrap from today's brief localisation and language optimisations by Google India. L10n was fine tuned to make noise about the company's local language computing models, which understandably doesn't draw much consumer attention right away.