Voice Search arrives in the Middle East
Voice Search arrives in the Middle East Today, we are very pleased to announce the launch of Voice Search in Arabic and Hebrew for Android and iPhone users. Users in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, UAE, and Israel can now speak Arabic and Hebrew into their phones to get search results quickly and easily. With this launch, Voice Search is now supported in 29 languages and accents in 37 countries. When building support for Arabic and Hebrew into our language model we faced some unique challenges, including how to understand words with diacritics (accents that indicate a difference in pronunciation, a linguistic phenomenon called �Nikud� in Hebrew, and �Tashkil� in Arabic) and words appended with other words (�and� for example) that can have many different nuanced meanings. To train our system we collected over one million utterances in Arabic and Hebrew, using the languages as they are spoken in the more populated parts of each country. For Arabic, we trained the system to recogn...