By Charles Mgbolu

Google’s Communications Manager for SubSaharan Africa, Julie Taylor has opened up on some of the challenges confronting the giant search engine and it’s many technological innovations as it relates to Nigeria and indeed Africa and language barrier had topped the list.

In a response to an array of questions sent by this reporter following the launch of the search engine’s first voice recognition technology on the continent that recognises the Zulu and Afrikaans language, Julie had said the company would have wished to do more had it not been for language issues stating that there was there is very little web content currently available in most African languages.

She said “We are engaged in various efforts to increase the amount of African content online, including through products like Baraza, our new question-and-answer product, which will be integrated into search results.

We also hope that the introduction of voice search in Zulu will serve as a catalyst for the creation of additional content. Lastly, we are also interested to use translation technology to translate the vast amount of resources on the web to other under served languages.”

Further, she said: “We want to make the internet locally relevant and useful for Africans.  We’re always working to localize our products as much as possible, and are very excited to have brought Voice Search to Africa for the first time, but don’t have anything more to announce at this time.”