Indic Phonetic keyboards for Hindi and other Indian languages now available for PC

This must interest those who write in an Indic language. With release of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 18272, support for Indic Phonetic keyboards have been added. In addition to the Indic Traditional INSCRIPT keyboards already available, with this build Indic Phonetic keyboards for Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam have been added.

So with this support, as you type, it gets transliterated to suggested possible Indic text. For example, if you typed “namaste” using the Hindi Phonetic keyboard it would suggest नमस्ते, as you can see in the below gif:

One having knowledge of any of the above stated languages can try with either the hardware or touch keyboard.
Here are the steps to get started:

1. Select Start > Settings > Time & Language-> Language from the navigation menu.
2. Select the + icon labeled [Add a preferred language] (or skip ahead to step 4 if your preferred Indic language was already added).
3. Type the name of an Indic language into the search box and select it – for example “Hindi”. Click the Next button and install the Indic language on your device, which will return you to the Language page.
4. Now back on the Language page, click the one you just added, and then click the Options button. This will take you to that language’s options page.
5. Select the + icon labeled [Add a keyboard].
6. Enable the Phonetic keyboard, for example [Hindi Phonetic – Input method editor] – now the languages options page will look something like this:

      7.Click input indicator on the taskbar (or press the Windows key + Space) and select the Indic Phonetic keyboard. Time to type something!
Note: The dictionaries used for the Indic Phonetic keyboards need to be downloaded. Right after adding the keyboard, please connect to Internet – you may need to wait a bit for the dictionary download to finish.