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Comment by neel8986 | Hacker News Reader

It is extremely difficult to type in Indian local language. I can hardly go to 10-20 wpm in Hindi or Bengali. Also as mentioned in the article more than 80% population in India is not at all comfortable in English. I have seen my mother (who has a master degree in her native language) struggling really hard to form a proper google query in English.

I don't know what is the correct solution but voice can definately be valid option

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It's not terrible on Android - I use the Hindi keyboard to write Marathi just fine. It's slower than English for sure because Swype doesn't work (or at least I haven't tried and can't imagine it working the same way for Marathi). And also because I don't have as much practice with it as I do with English.

Mac OS also has transliteration tools built-in for typing Hindi and most other Indian languages (though, again, not Marathi - you have to use Hindi transliteration and hope you get the right word suggestions). You can use the Caps Lock key to quickly switch between English and Hindi. I don't know if Windows has a similar feature but I wouldn't be surprised if it did - it's even more popular in India than OS X.

google search works fine in hindi

https://www.google.com/search?q=गोलगप्पे

also typing in hindi using transliteration is as fast as english for me.

https://www.google.com/inputtools/try/

transliteration involves a good understanding of english alphabets and qwetry. Many people in india don't have that. Only people who regularly type using transliteration are those who are familiar in english

Also hindi language search is lacking many features which is taken for granted. Situation for other language are even worse

Look at the result for two same search in english and bengali https://www.google.co.in/search?q=delhi+to+calcutta https://www.google.co.in/search?q=%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B...

> transliteration involves a good understanding of english alphabets and query. Many people in india don't have that.

That's true. I hadn't thought of it. OTOH transliteration tools are more for desktop/laptop users who use the keyboard that comes with their machine. On mobile (which is where most of these "next billion" users are going to be) it'll be a language-specific keyboard with no knowledge of English letters needed.

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