Google’s Gboard is surely one of the best keyboard apps out there. Giving people more reasons to use Gboard as their primary keyboard app, the company announced that it now supports 500 languages across the world. With this milestone, the company claims that Gboard is now capable enough to serve more than 90 percent of the world population.
Nigerian Pidgin, Rangpuri, Pontic Greek, Balinese, are among the few examples of languages that were added recently. The company also announced that Gboard now supports 40 writing systems ranging from Roman and Cyclic to scripts that are used for only one language.
In order for a new language to get better over time, Google has a machine learning language model which trains Gboard to know when and how to autocorrect your typing or to predict your next word. However, the machine learning language model cannot solve every problem especially when there is not enough text data online for the language. To overcome this hurdle, the company invites a group of native speakers to test and then fill out a survey to understand their typing experience.
