Last month, Google announced a series of new features that will optimize the use of Spanish across their applications. In conjunction with the LEIA project by the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Español/RAE), Google will integrate the Academy’s dictionary into Gboard and as well as the main Google search engine.
Edgar Camelo, Google’s Strategic Partner Development Manager, confirmed that the company is continuing to improve the keyboard’s language functionality. He announced the two core updates with aims to improve the use of Spanish in both Search and Gboard, with efforts to facilitate the use of Spanish across all technological environments.
Thanks to this collaboration, users will be able to experience the fastest corrections within Gboard typing, in addition to hundreds of words in the most up-to-date version of the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary, such as “cryptocurrencies” and “Ibuprofen.” The RAE dictionary will also be responsible for official definitions of Spanish words, searched for on the Google search engine tool.
Given the broad global diaspora of Spanish speakers, variations and dialects, Google promises to ensure that each Spanish vernacular is covered in its update, with contributions to the Search dictionary from 23 distinct Spanish language academies around the world.
Google has additionally attested that the new dictionary entries on Gboard will ensure standardized predictive features, allowing articulate sentences to be typed Spanish with minimal hassle for users.
Through the use of Gboard’s AI language models, users can expect faster autocorrect on native Spanish names such as García, Rodríguez, and Coruña, as well as words with specific accents such as música.
Prior to this update, these words were susceptible to being incorrectly flagged for spelling mistakes or prone to unnecessary autocorrections. Additionally, Google announced that hundreds of thousands of new words are being brought directly into the keyboard app, making the Spanish language on Gboard more complete than ever.
The recent news follows Google’s commitment in recent years, to expand its reach to the Spanish-speaking community by ensuring increased presence of the Spanish language in its tools.