Google Inc. is ramping up its effort to get more Indians online with the introduction of improved language support across multiple products.

Internet users in the Indian subcontinent currently number around 400 million, but Google has made no secret of its desire to increase this number. Last year at its second Google India event, the company announced plans to get its products in front of “the next billion” Internet users, and is specifically targeting the country, which has a population of more than 1.3 billion.

In order to make its products more useful for the millions of Indians that don’t speak English, the company has expanded and improved its automatic translation tools in Google Chrome. It has also added more common Indian languages to its Gboard app, and a Hindi language dictionary to Google Search.

The translation improvements have been made thanks to Google’s advances in “Neural Machine Translation.” This is Google’s new translation system that uses machine learning technologies to better understand entire sentences.

The old Google Translate simply translated one word at a time, but different language rules, structures and grammar meant that many translations to and from Indian languages were muddled at best. With Neural Machine Translation, however, Google’s system is much better at understanding context, and its translations are noticeably better than before.

This new system has now been incorporated into Google Chrome, so Indian users can translate entire web pages into their own language and actually understand them for once. Google now offers improved translation for nine Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada.

With Gboard, Google is adding 11 new Indian languages, which means it now supports a total of 22. The app also offers transliteration for the first time, which means users can spell out Indian language words phonetically using the English alphabet, and Gboard will rewrite them using the native characters.

The new translation features and update app should go a long way toward making Google’s products and services more accessible to Indian users who aren’t fluent in English. Whether or not the improvements will actually get more Indians online is another matter, given that poor connectivity remains a crippling issue in the country.

Image: Google