About TypeTamilOnline

What This Site Is

TypeTamilOnline is a set of free tools for typing and converting Tamil: a phonetic editor where vanakkam→வணக்கம், an on-screen Tamil keyboard, transliteration in both directions, voice typing, and converters for old Tamil fonts such as Bamini. Alongside the tools are guides to setting up Tamil on phones and computers.

Why It Exists

Most people who write Tamil online spell it in English letters first. The tools that turn that into Tamil script tend to be cluttered with ads, slow on a phone, or send every word to a server. The desktop app many people relied on, Google Input Tools for Windows, is no longer offered. We wanted one fast, quiet page that works on a cheap phone and a work PC alike, and that respects the fact that what you write is yours.

How the Typing Engine Works

Everything runs in your browser. When the page loads, the engine comes with it, and from then on no word you type is sent anywhere.

1. Rules first. Your English letters are split into Tamil sounds by a set of transliteration rules. Many letters are ambiguous: n can be ந, ன or ண, and l can be ல, ள or ழ. So the rules produce several candidate spellings, not one.

2. A dictionary ranks them. The candidates are scored against a list of real Tamil words and how likely each spelling is, learned from openly licensed Tamil text. Real words rise to the top.

3. Your choices count. When you pick a different suggestion, that word ranks higher for you next time. This history is stored only in your browser.

There are three exceptions to “nothing leaves your device”: voice typing, which uses your browser’s speech service; server translation, which sends your text to our translation server only after you agree, and does not store it; and the optional Google Translate link on the translation tools, which you have to click. The privacy page explains exactly what that means.

How Accurate It Is

We measure it. On a held-out test set of real romanizations typed by native speakers (words the engine never learned from), the first suggestion is the intended Tamil word about 76% of the time, and the right word is in the top five about 85% of the time. Some misses are unavoidable: puli can honestly mean புலி (tiger) or புளி (tamarind), which is why every word has a suggestion list. These numbers are checked automatically on every change, so the engine cannot quietly get worse. The accuracy page explains the test set, the results and the words it still gets wrong.

Data and Credits

• Word list and spelling statistics contain data adapted from the Dakshina dataset v1.0 by Google Research (Roark et al., LREC 2020), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our adapted word list is shared under the same licence.
• Tamil typewriter, Tamil99 and Bamini layouts are based on open-source Keyman keyboards (MIT licence) by SIL Global and their authors, including Visual Media and thamizha.com.
• The TSCII table follows the TSCII 1.7 standard, cross-checked against the GNU C Library character map.
• The TAB and TAM tables follow the TamilNet99 glyph encoding standard, adopted by the Government of Tamil Nadu in G.O. Ms. No. 17 (13 June 1999) and G.O. Ms. No. 28 (9 August 1999), as published on tamilvu.org.
• Our typing engine is also available to other websites as a small embeddable widget and as a package: free to use with a visible credit link (licence), with the word list under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Fonts: Anek Tamil and Hanken Grotesk, under the SIL Open Font License.

Editorial Standards

• Checked steps. Every how-to guide is checked against the current official help pages from Apple, Google, Samsung or Microsoft, which we list at the end of the guide with the date we checked. Where a step cannot be confirmed in an official source, we leave it out or say so.
• Dated updates. Each guide shows when it was last updated, next to the byline. Phone menus change, and we revise guides when they do. Changes to the site are listed in the changelog.
• No claims we cannot back up. We describe what the tools do today, not what we plan. Where something could not be verified, we say so or leave it out.
• Independent. We are not affiliated with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung or any keyboard maker, and nobody pays to be mentioned.
• Corrections welcome. If a word converts wrongly or a guide is out of date, tell us. Fixes go into the changelog.