English

Writing Across the World's Languages: Deep Internationalization for Gboard, the Google Keyboard

Human-Computer Interaction 2019-12-04 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

This technical report describes our deep internationalization program for Gboard, the Google Keyboard. Today, Gboard supports 900+ language varieties across 70+ writing systems, and this report describes how and why we have been adding support for hundreds of language varieties from around the globe. Many languages of the world are increasingly used in writing on an everyday basis, and we describe the trends we see. We cover technological and logistical challenges in scaling up a language technology product like Gboard to hundreds of language varieties, and describe how we built systems and processes to operate at scale. Finally, we summarize the key take-aways from user studies we ran with speakers of hundreds of languages from around the world.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.01218,
  title  = {Writing Across the World's Languages: Deep Internationalization for Gboard, the Google Keyboard},
  author = {Daan van Esch and Elnaz Sarbar and Tamar Lucassen and Jeremy O'Brien and Theresa Breiner and Manasa Prasad and Evan Crew and Chieu Nguyen and Françoise Beaufays},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.01218},
  year   = {2019}
}