Transliteration [NOT “Translation”] is typing with phonetic characters. That is, typing Tamil words using English alphabets based on their phonetic sound. See the below picture, “vanakkam” is turned into a Tamil word ??????? . Now you can transliterate easily in Android phones.
Gboard Keyboard
SwiftKey and Gboard (Google’s Keyboard for Android) now supports this transliteration. To enable this, download the language package in the keyboard app’s settings. Both are good in different ways. Here is the small lookup on both keyboards.
Gboard
Offers two different keyboards for typing in Tamil, you have to download both from language settings. There is two different ‘Tamil’ keyboard, one is for Transliteration from English to Tamil and another is with Tamil characters/script.
Pro: Fast, Transliterate in text space, Tamil words prediction is good.
Cons: Tamil script layout is alphabetical (see below pictures), Need to switch keyboard to type in English and Tamil.
SwiftKey
Top performing keyboard since it was in business. Improved a lot recently and added support for Indian languages. Customizable Keyboard with plenty of themes and excels in prediction after learning from your typing. Swiping the spacebar on the keyboard switches between languages.
Pros: Great prediction (the more you use, the more accurate the prediction is), faster, supports multi lingual (yes, it predicts words from both Tamil and English at the same time), QWERTY Tamil layout.
Cons: Lacks Google’s search inside the keyboard, transliterate the word only after completing the word.
Check the below screenshots and get the keyboard you like most. If you have questions, post them below in comment section 🙂
SwiftKey’s KeyboardDifferent Keyboards available to chooseSwiftKey’s Tamil Script QWERTY LayoutGboard’s Tamil alphabetical LayoutGboard’s transliterationSwiftKey Multilingual Keyboard predicting both English and Tamil words
