It’s a regular day in our lives. As non-native English speakers, we’re reading a new Shashi Tharoor tweet and we don’t understand what he means by it. Take for example, ‘farrago’. (Did you really know what it meant before it went viral?)
If you’re a millennial or a tech-savvy boomer you’re going to flip out your phone and look up that word. Now you know the meaning, however, would you know how to say it should it ever come up in a conversation?
Search engine Google shall now help you actively improve your pronunciation on its interface. While previously users could hear the pronunciation of a particular word by clicking on the speaker icon by the side of a word, now using machine learning Google will actively listen to and improve your pronunciation.
Google’s Senior Product Manager Tal Snir explains, “…Speech recognition technology processes spoken words by separating them into individual soundbites. Using machine learning, it then cross references your pronunciation with the pronunciation it expects.”
The feature is currently available in English and should soon roll out to Spanish followed by other languages as well, he said. With this, the tech giant also announced that it shall be adding visual aides to its searches, with relevant images popping up when a particular word is looked up.
