The Indic Project, which belongs to the Indian non-profit Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC), has released a new and significantly upgraded version of its input app “Indic Keyboard” for the Android mobile operating system. This major update comes roughly one year after the app’s initial release in March 2014.

Indic Keyboard now supports 22 Asian languages, including 18 Indian languages apart from English, and 54 input layouts. The 23 supported languages are Assamese, Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Manipuri, Maithili, Marathi, Mon, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. On its company blog, SMC lists the various features included in the new update:

• Addition of 7 new languages and several new layouts.
• We now support 23 languages and 54 layouts in total.
• All new Setup wizard makes it simpler for you to get started.
• Material design, ability to changes themes.
• Material white, Material dark, Holo blue and Holo white themes are available.
• Intelligent word suggestion for transliteration – type faster with fewer keystrokes.
• For languages with complex letters we now have the ability to type ZWJ and ZWNJ characters directly.
• Arabic keyboard – by popular demand.
• Code base is updated to support Android Lollipop edition.
• A number of bug fixes

As a promoter and developer of free and open source language technology, SMC plans to focus more on cross-platform mobile input-library-building and policy-level adoption for language input and other language technology advancements in the near future. SMC says it’s currently in talks with the Indian government about mandating native keyboards on smart phones.

The keyboard can be downloaded from the Google Play store

Read more: globalvoicesonline.org – Written by Subhashish Panigrahi