'Maghanap sa Google' now on Chrome for desktop

Published July 18, 2013 5:19pm

Now, Filipino computer users can say "maghanap sa Google" even if they don't have mobile devices running Google's Android.

Google has brought the voice search feature - in Filipino - to desktop computers running the search giant's Chrome browser.

"When visiting google.com.ph with the language set to Filipino, users can click on the microphone icon to get Google to start listening," Google said.

To power the search, Google engineers work with native speakers and collect speech samples.

For the Filipino voice search, Google said it built its model from scratch, working with volunteers from the University of Philippines Diliman campus.

"Many student volunteers helped, with some students even recording their family members speech to get a broader demographic of voice samples. Once the samples were collected, Google was able to build acoustical and language models that taught computers how to 'recognize' Filipino," it said.

But Google noted that while its voice search can recognize regional accents in Filipino, "it isn’t 100% perfect" though it may improve as more people use Voice Search.

“At Google, we want to make it easier and faster for you to get the answers that you need, simply by speaking your queries to Google. We’re delighted to launch these new Search tools for the Filipino language today and demonstrate our commitment to Filipinos and to continually improving their search experience,” said Gail Tan, Google Philippines' head of public affairs and communications.

'Taglish' challenge in modeling

But Google admitted a major challenge in the language modeling was that Filipino speakers usually mix several languages - such as English - in their daily lives.

It had to collect many acoustic samples to fine-tune its search. — TJD, GMA News

Tags: google, googlechrome