Google Translate just got a lot smarter
The
search giant says it's made a "leap" in giving you more natural
translations. It's just one step in a big push in machine learning that Google
detailed Tuesday.
World
travelers, language nerds and everyone in between, you're in luck.
Google
said Tuesday it has vastly improved its Google Translate app, available on
phones and the web.
The search giant said it's now
incorporating "neural machine translation" into the software, which
means it can translate whole sentences at a time, instead of breaking the text
down to smaller chunks and translating those pieces.
The
result is translations coming out more natural, with better syntax and grammar,
Google said.
"It
has improved more in one single leap than in 10 years combined," Barak
Turovsky, the product lead for Google Translate, said during a press event at
Google's San Francisco office.
Besides
English, the new translation system is coming to eight of the 103 languages
supported by the app. They are French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese,
Japanese, Korean and Turkish. Google says those languages represent 35 percent
of all translations done on the service. Turovsky said the new method cuts down
on errors by 55 to 85 percent.
Google
has bet the future of the company on artificial
intelligence and machine learning -- a type of technology in which
computers can learn without being explicitly programmed. Last month, the
company unveiled several new consumer devices that feature a digital helper Google
calls "the assistant," similar to Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa.
But Google bills it as the natural evolution of its iconic search box, drawing
on the reams of data Google knows about you. Instead of typing a search query
into a text box at your desktop computer, you'll speak commands to your phone,
watch or smart home hub.
When
Google CEO Sundar
Pichai first introduced the concept of the assistant in May, he said it was
the cornerstone of Google's "journey" to becoming an
"AI-first" company.
The
search giant isn't the only Silicon Valley giant that has made big investments
in machine learning recently. Earlier this year, Facebook started an Applied
Machine Learning division, where it works on technology like photo and audio
recognition.
Google
on Tuesday also said it's forming a Cloud Machine Learning group, which will
focus on bringing its AI technology to other businesses. The group will be
headed by Fei-Fei Li, an AI professor at Stanford, and Jia Li, former head of
research at Snap, the parent company of Snapchat.
One
of the group's new projects aims to improve how job listings are categorized.
One customer is FedEx, and the new service lets a job seeker more easily search
for a warehouse job, even if the job title or or description doesn't have the
word "warehouse" in it. (For example, "Fork lift operator 3rd
shift.)
Diane
Greene, who leads the company's cloud division, summed up the goal:
"Google takes machine learning in every form and takes it to the
world."
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
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