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Google Translate will help Wikipedia fill its non-English websites
Google is helping the Wikimedia Foundation achieve its goal of making Wikipedia articles available in a lot more languages. The Foundation has added Google Translate to its content translation tool, which human editors can use to add content to non-English Wikipedia websites. Those editors can take advantage of the new option -- "one of the most advanced machine translation systems available today," the foundation called it -- to generate an initial translation that they can then review and edit for readability in their language.
Google is working to remove gender bias in its translations
Google has taken a step towards reducing gender bias on the Google Translate website. In the past, when a word could be translated in either a masculine or feminine form, only one translation was provided, and because Google Translate learns from existing examples of translations, biases in those samples can be transferred to Translate's responses. That could sometimes result in words like "strong" or "doctor" leading to masculine translations while words like "nurse" or "beautiful" could produce feminine translations. Now, however, for certain languages, Translate will offer both a masculine and a feminine translation when either might be appropriate.
Google Translate adds real-time translations for 13 new languages
Google announced this week that its Translate app for iOS and Android recognize 13 new languages through your smartphone's camera. The update, which includes support for Arabic and Hindi, is in the process of being rolled out to Translate users worldwide, per VentureBeat.
Google Translate for iOS can speak in your local accent
Until now, using Google Translate on your iPhone has meant listening to the same pronunciation for translations no matter where you live. That's not very considerate, and potentially a problem if you live in countries where foreign accents could make comprehension difficult. You won't have that issue from now on -- an update to Google Translate has added speech output in local versions of multiple languages, including English, Bengali, French and Spanish. You can hear English results with an Indian accent, for instance, or listen to French with a Canadian spin.
Google improves Translate with offline AI
Google isn't going to sit idly by while Microsoft brings AI-based offline translation to your phone. The company is rolling out internet-free neural machine translation to its Translate apps for Android and iOS, promising much more accurate language conversion when you don't have the luxury of data. The initial release covers 58 languages, including a slew of European and Indian languages as well as common translation targets like Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.
Google voice recognition could transcribe doctor visits
Doctors work long hours, and a disturbingly large part of that is documenting patient visits -- one study indicates that they spend 6 hours of an 11-hour day making sure their records are up to snuff. But how do you streamline that work without hiring an army of note takers? Google Brain and Stanford think voice recognition is the answer. They recently partnered on a study that used automatic speech recognition (similar to what you'd find in Google Assistant or Google Translate) to transcribe both doctors and patients during a session.
Google made its own earbuds because it killed the headphone jack
Google followed Apple's "courageous" move to eliminate the 3.5mm headphone jack on the Pixel 2, and like the handset itself, Google designed a pair of headphones to (hopefully) best show off Assistant's capabilities. Like real-time translation so you can have a conversation with someone who speaks one of 40 foreign tongues. They're called Pixel Buds, which, let's be honest, sounds adorable. As soon as you pair them with your Pixel or Android phone running Nougat or higher, Assistant is available.
Google wants its Assistant to be your personal translator
Two of the biggest digital assistants are taking different pathways to find more users. Amazon recently made its intentions clear: It wants to play nice with its rivals. And so we're getting Microsoft Cortana integration with Alexa, and vice versa. That's on top of the thousands of third-party skills Amazon's AI already has. Google, on the other hand, is focussing on making its tech more self-reliant. Judging by its latest demonstration, its efforts are paying off. The company just unveiled a bunch of impressive features at a Google Developer Days keynote. They indicate that Google Assistant now possesses better contextual awareness. Not only will it be able to answer some of your vaguest questions, but it will also come in handy on your travels.
Google's AI-powered translator works with three more languages
Google wants language translation to sound more natural. Last year, it began moving away from phrase-based machine translation and created an AI-powered system called Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT). Now, the company says it's expanding GNMT to Hindi, Russian and Vietnamese.
Google expands mission to make automated translations suck less
What started with Mandarin Chinese is expanding to English; French; German; Japanese; Korean; Portuguese and Turkish, as Google has increased the languages its Neural Machine Translation (NMT) handle. "These represent the native languages of around one-third of the world's population, covering more than 35 percent of all Google Translate queries," according to The Keyword blog. The promise here is that because NMT uses the context of the entire sentence, rather than translating individual words on their own, the results will be more accurate, especially as time goes on, thanks to machine learning. For a comparison of the two methods, check out the GIF embedded below.
Google's Chinese-to-English translations might now suck less
Mandarin Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to translate to English, and for those who rely on Google Translate to decipher important information, machine-based tools simply aren't good enough. All that is about to change, as Google today announced it has implemented a new learning system in its web and mobile translation apps that will bring significantly better results.
Google Now on Tap translates languages in any app
You no longer have to select text or keep a mini-app running to translate text in your Android apps. Google is expanding Android Marshmallow's Now on Tap feature to support text translation from any screen. If you're looking at text that doesn't match your phone's current language, Now on Tap will offer to translate that screen even if there are multiple unfamiliar tongues on screen. It's available today if your phone is set to use either a major European language or Russian... and it's not the only feature rolling out today.
Google Translate now works in apps on any Android phone
If you hate having to paste foreign language text into Google Translate just to understand it, your worries are over. Google has updated Translate for Android to introduce Tap to Translate, an expansion of the translation-anywhere feature it introduced on Marshmallow last fall. Anyone running Android 4.2 or later can now decipher unfamiliar text on the spot simply by copying it -- helpful if you frequently run into messages or social posts that aren't in familiar tongues.
Microsoft's Translator app gets image recognition on Android
Microsoft Translator's image translation is simple: point your phone's camera at a sign or menu in any of the 21 supported languages and the app translates it in real-time onscreen. The app's iOS version got it back in February and now the feature comes to the Android one. But a few other features and language additions come along with the update.
Google is using neural networks to improve Translate
Google has got a pretty good handle on AI, judging by its shocking back-to-back wins against a 9-dan champ Lee Sedol in the intricate strategy game Go. Though the company is using it in Google Photos, Gmail and other apps, it may soon bring deep learning to one that really needs it: Google Translate. Anybody who uses that app regularly knows that its translations are flaky, at best, especially for languages that are vastly different from English, like Sedol's native Korean.
Google thinks it can make translated apps fail less
While often hilarious, mistranslations can be embarrassing or even dangerous. Google, which is no doubt responsible for a large number of those, has come up with a way to help developers ensure their apps make sense in other languages. The problem is that machines don't understand context -- as an example, Google cites the word "auto," which can be translated to French either as automatic or automobile, depending on how it's used. That prompted the search giant to develop the Language Quality Survey (LQS), consisting of 10 questions that developers can pose to foreign users.
Google Translate works within apps for Android Marshmallow users
When Android Marshmallow arrives on your device, you can also get a really handy update for Google Translate. Instead of having to switch between apps to translate text, you'll be able to do some language switching right within the app you're using. Simply highlight the text you want to read or write up and click Translate when it pops up. You can use it, for instance, to read reviews on TripAdvisor about a hotel overseas, scan the LinkedIn profile of a person from another country or talk to someone who's not that fluent in your language on WhatsApp. Mountain View says the feature is ready to use with any app that takes advantage of Android's text selection behavior, and developers can easily update their applications to support it. It's already rolling out within this week, but you might get the latest version of Android itself later than that, depending on your device's manufacturer.
Google Translate can help you with text in 20 new languages
Let's face it: Google Translate is a handy tool when traveling abroad or reading text on the web that's written in a different language. The software already offered help with seven languages, and today Mountain View added 20 more. This means that you'll be able to translate to and from English to Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Turkish and several others. You'll also be able to leverage one-way translation from English to Hindi or Thai. And all of those are just for printed text.
Google Translate gets more conversational
Google Translate is notorious for spewing out either oddly worded or overly formal results, but the company says it's getting better thanks to people's help. Mountain View's online translator is now more adept at figuring out informal speech -- for instance, it can tell if you want to ask "Is everything alright?" when what you've typed in has another more literal translation, as you can see below the fold. That's all made possible by the volunteers who spend time translating phrases and checking the quality of other people's submissions on the Translate community website. The company promises to incorporate more and more translations over time as its service learns each language better. Hopefully, that means locals won't look at us funny next time we try to use it overseas.
Google moves one step closer to becoming a universal translator
Even with the assistance of modern technology, holding a conversation in two different languages can be difficult. Google Translate allows you to speak with someone and have each utterance translated as text and audio, but until now you had to manually toggle every time the other person talked. As expected, Google is speeding up the process with smarter language recognition and speaker switching, which comes as part of a new update. So when you boot up the app and press the microphone icon, it'll recognise which of the two languages is being spoken, offer a translation and then automatically alternate whenever the conversation flips over. No more tapping on the screen again and again.
