“Albert Wong had spent his whole life trying —and failing — to type Cantonese characters on a computer.
“But now, thanks to time allowed by Google’s 20-percent projects, some terrific teamwork and a whole lot of effort, he’s helped build an answer.
“A year’s worth of work has come to fruition today, as Google just released the first tool ever that allows users to easily input Cantonese into a web browser using English phonetics, solving a problem that’s existed for decades …
“Wong, a Seattle native and software engineer at the Google office here in the Emerald City, was traveling last year with [fellow Google software engineer and fellow UW CSE alum] Hannah Tang in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is widely spoken. The two had trouble using a Yelp-equivalent app because they couldn’t figure out how to enter particular Cantonese characters …
“So for the next 12 months, Wong and Tang rallied up fellow Googlers from Mountain View, New York City, Beijing and Singapore to help them develop a way to fix this difficult and complex problem …”
Read more in GeekWire here.