SwiftKey Introduces Transliteration Feature For Some Of Its Users

Have you tried typing out words for something that was meant to be written in another language? For example everyone knows that “arigato” means “thank you” in Japanese, but what if typing “arigato” would allow you the option to translate that into Kanji automatically? We guess it’s not really a big deal, but it would be cool, right?

The good news is that if you are a Hindi or Gurjarati speaker, it seems that SwiftKey has recently announced the launch of an improved transliteration feature for the keyboard. Transliteration isn’t exactly a new feature for SwiftKey, but it seems that it has been improved upon for Hindi and Gurjarati speaking users.

So what does this mean? Like in the example we gave above, all users have to do is type the English equivalent of the word they’re trying to say, and SwiftKey will be smart enough to detect it and offer you the Hindi equivalent. For example typing “Namaste” will offer users the option to change it to “नमस्ते”.

The update should already be live and users won’t need to do anything other than update their app. According to Aarti Samani, India Product Manager of SwiftKey, “SwiftKey’s aim is to always make typing easier, particularly if you speak more than one language and want to switch seamlessly between them without changing any of your settings. We’re proud to be introducing the feature in Hindi, one of the world’s most spoken languages, and Gujarati, which had previously not been possible to write in English letters.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Apps, swiftkey