Google just made life easier for those who wish to type in Hindi on their Android devices – the company has released Hindi Input keyboard on the Play Store, which allows typing in Hindi as well as allows transliteration of words written in English to Hindi.
Transliteration – which can be enabled by toggling the button on the left of the space bar on the keyboard – basically means that when you type a Hindi word using English letters, the keyboard converts them into Hindi characters. For example, “kaise hai aap” gets automatically converted to “कैसे है आप”. I gave it a go in a couple of tweets, and it works amazingly well and has almost a 99% accuracy rate. Even when you might see a wrong punctuation here and there, the auto correction options usually come to the rescue and provide the correctly punctuated version.
Of course, you can type directly using Hindi letters as well, though with the letters scattered on multiple pages, transliteration may actually be a faster option. The accuracy of the keyboard no matter how you use it seems to be awesome though, so kudos to the team that developed it.
With the introduction of the Play Books service in India today as well as the launch of the Hindi Input keyboard, it seems Google is taking an active interest in the country, and maybe we’ll even see Nexus devices becoming available from the Play Store this year at those crazily low prices, along with music and movies.
So go ahead and download the keyboard from the Play Store to give it a try. Remember, you’ll have to enable the keyboard after installing it from the language and input options on your device, before you can use it. And don’t forget to say thanks to Google for this awesome keyboard!
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