Looks like Google is giving out a bunch of goodies to its Indian users. After launching Google Play Books in India, Google has now launched Google Hindi Input for Android devices.
This will kill a lot of Hindi keyboard replacement apps out there.
Google Hindi Input will allow a user to type messages, update on social networks and compose emails in Hindi on Android devices.
Apart from changing the keyboard to the Hindi alphabet, one can also use the transliteration mode, to type a Hindi word in English characters and the app will converts it to Hindi.
After downloading the app from the Google Play Store, you will have to go to Language & Input setting on your phone and select Google Hindi Input to activate the keyboard. When one goes to an app which supports typing, one will be greeted by an English keyboard. Clicking on the globe button will change it to Hindi, while toggling the button “a->?” next to it will switch the transliteration mode on and off.
The Hindi consonants are alphabetically ordered into 2 pages and can be navigated by pressing the paging button “1/2” “2/2”.
The Google Input Tool for Windows supports multiple Indian languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, and we hope that official support for multiple languages comes soon to Android directly from Google.
Although there are multiple keyboards on the Play Store like Hindi Bindi, Sparsh and SwiftKey, which allow for Hindi typing as well as Hindi transliteration, we found that experience with Google Hindi input to be very fluid and polished.
Last year, Robosoft (in partnership with Bangalore-based United Telecoms), had launched WIWOS, India’s first Android device with Indic language support.
