Seems Google also believes in the old adage change is the only constant. By now, we aren’t strangers anymore to the Google habit of discontinuing services, winding up tools and merging them together. Of course we can’t whine as almost all of those services are free and made life easier on the web.
The latest merger seems to be the Google Transliterate into Google Input Tools. Agreed that it doesn’t make any sense to keep two similar (actually identical) projects floating around, but they could have retained the Google Transliterate GUI. For, the Input Tools interface - the virtual keyboard - plainly sucks (though we have the option of not using it).
It was in Oct 2007 that support for Tamil was added to the Google Transliterate. For another year and half or so, the dictionary support was awful. If one wasn’t careful, the whole context of the statement would be reversed by Google Transliterate.
:-)
By end-2010 the engine became so good, it was almost intuitive and people (including me) have started to rely on it. It was stunning to see Google Transliteration Engine being used for the Indic script input in the Aadhaar / UID project - which itself raises question on its integrity (but that is for another post).
BTP, I haven’t used the Transliteration engine for last 3 weeks or so - last was just before Pongal holidays. Thus today it was total disorientation to see the browser redirect from
www.google.com/transliterate/tamil to www.google.com/inputtools/cloud/try/
On the Cloud the Google Input Tools work exactly like the older Google Transliterate, though as said, I like the older interface better. The new Input Tools layout resembles that of the Google Translate.
;-)
And the old Google Transliterate interface.
The Chrome extension too works fine.
All it needs to be tried out is on the desktop and on the android phone.
The latest merger seems to be the Google Transliterate into Google Input Tools. Agreed that it doesn’t make any sense to keep two similar (actually identical) projects floating around, but they could have retained the Google Transliterate GUI. For, the Input Tools interface - the virtual keyboard - plainly sucks (though we have the option of not using it).
It was in Oct 2007 that support for Tamil was added to the Google Transliterate. For another year and half or so, the dictionary support was awful. If one wasn’t careful, the whole context of the statement would be reversed by Google Transliterate.
:-)
By end-2010 the engine became so good, it was almost intuitive and people (including me) have started to rely on it. It was stunning to see Google Transliteration Engine being used for the Indic script input in the Aadhaar / UID project - which itself raises question on its integrity (but that is for another post).
BTP, I haven’t used the Transliteration engine for last 3 weeks or so - last was just before Pongal holidays. Thus today it was total disorientation to see the browser redirect from
www.google.com/transliterate/tamil to www.google.com/inputtools/cloud/try/
On the Cloud the Google Input Tools work exactly like the older Google Transliterate, though as said, I like the older interface better. The new Input Tools layout resembles that of the Google Translate.
;-)
And the old Google Transliterate interface.
The Chrome extension too works fine.
All it needs to be tried out is on the desktop and on the android phone.
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