Google has flipped the switch on Indonesian, Malaysian, and Latin American Spanish support in Voice Search. Speakers of those langauges from around the world now have access to the wide range of voice-searchable items on their smartphones and mobile devices that those speaking languages such as English have had for quite some time now.

While the expanded support is pretty cool, the real story here is the way Google collected the data necessary to provide new language support. Rather than program a computer for what it could expect to hear, Google went the crowd-sourcing route and enlisted local users from around the glob to collect voice data and train their software for proper detection of accents and dialects across regions. They call the whole thing “word of mouth,” which is both clever and true. You can read more at the source link below.


[via Google]