India is the land of diverse culture and language, but with technology being built predominantly to cater to the English-speaking world, there’s a gap that still needs to be addressed to boost adoption of technology in the country.
Reverie Language Technologies will launch Swalekh, a multilingual keyboard, on January 26 on the Google Play Store. The keyboard will support 11 Indian languages, and will be compatible with all Android-based devices. These languages are : Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, apart from English.
Swalekh can be used in three modes – native, phonetic and macaronic. In native mode, users will be able to type in their native language character keyboard. In phonetic mode, a users will be able to type in English, while the text automatically gets converted to the language of their choice. Marcaronic mode will allow users to write in multiple languages at the same time.
The team behind Swalekh prides itself for making a product in India, for India. Reverie is looking to address the local language user experience problem from all angles, empowering local language users. Moving forward, the company also plans to add support for several official Indian languages and dialects to appeal to as large a target group as they can.