Writing Across the World's Languages: Deep Internationalization for Gboard, the Google Keyboard
This work addresses the problem of enabling digital writing access for diverse global language communities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing language technology products.
The paper tackles the challenge of scaling Gboard, the Google Keyboard, to support over 900 language varieties across 70+ writing systems, describing the technological and logistical systems built to achieve this and summarizing key insights from user studies with speakers of hundreds of languages.
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.