Introducing the Transliteration API

by Gokul Nath Babu and Anupama Dutta, Software Engineers

We're excited to announce a new addition to the AJAX Language API - the Transliteration API. Transliteration is the process of phonetically converting a word written in one script into another. We launched transliteration on India Labs a year ago to make it easier to type in Indian languages using an English keyboard. Since then, we've integrated this into a number of Google properties, such as orkut scraps, Blogger and search.

Now we'd like to make this functionality available to all websites through our API, which will make it easier for you to add transliteration capabilities to textfields on your webpages. Using this customizable API, you can enable users of your website to type in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. If you're looking for a finer level of control on your web pages, also check out the low-level interface to transliteration, and the font rendering support APIs that we have released.

Please try these out and let us know what you think and how you're using it. We'll also be discussing this API in detail during the Google Developer Day in Bangalore on October 18th. Please register to learn more.