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Apple's Support app expands to 20 more countries
The latest update for the Apple Support app -- the company's free, standalone tool designed to help users solve a range of service issues -- is now available, delivering a range of hotfixes and more. The most notable feature is the extension of support to over 20 new countries and regions. It also improves the app's overall accessibility with the addition of language assistance for Czech, Danish Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese and Russian.
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.
Pandora's CEO is doubling down on podcasts
By JP Mangalindan Pandora CEO Roger Lynch wants to offer listeners an easier way to discover new podcasts as the company adds more podcasts to its service and beefs up advertising. Indeed, podcasts will become a more significant aspect in the months and years ahead for Pandora, which has over 75 million monthly active users -- 5.5 million of which use Pandora's paid features and services. The key to growing those users, according to Lynch, who joined the company in September, is offering a more comprehensive catalog of content. "In the car, 80 percent of listening is music, while 20 percent is other stuff," Lynch explains to Yahoo Finance. "As a service, if you don't have that 20 percent, it doesn't mean you capture the 80 percent, because then people will just stay on their FM Radios. But if you can create audio content for people that gets packaged with the music content in a way that doesn't give them a reason to go back to that FM dial, then you capture much more than just the spoken word."
Gboard for Android now supports Chinese and Korean
Google announced today that Gboard for Android is getting a handful of new languages including Korean and both traditional and simplified Chinese. The company said that those have been the most requested languages for Android -- they're already on Gboard for iOS -- and they join 20 others that are rolling out to Gboard for Android now.
Duolingo adds French and German to its short story library
Six months ago, language learning service Duolingo introduced new mini-morsels of content called Stories. They walked users through short tales that would ideally be more organic than scripted conversations. Today, the service announced it's expanded beyond Spanish and Portuguese by adding 20 Stories each in French and German.
Microsoft built an AI-powered iOS app to help you learn Chinese
Language-learning apps are nothing new, with offerings from MIT and Duolingo ready to teach you a new way to communicate right on your phone. Now Microsoft is looking to teach you Chinese with a free new AI-powered iOS app.
Duolingo adds Mandarin course to its language library
Online language learning company Duolingo has finally added a Mandarin course to its offerings. With more than one billion speakers, Mandarin is the most popular language on the planet, but it's also on one of the hardest to learn, which is why the course will prove a little beefier than its European language counterparts. English speakers will learn the language's characters as well as the four tones of Mandarin, with lessons structured by themes such as greetings, food, health and sports.
Google Assistant for Android now supports Spanish and Italian
Google announced today that its virtual assistant will now support two new languages -- Spanish for users in the US, Mexico and Spain as well as Italian for those in Italy. These languages will be rolling out over the next few weeks, according to Google, and while initially they'll only be available for Android, the company says iPhone support will be released later this year.
Instagram now supports three right-to-left languages
You can post and comment in more than 24 different languages via Instagram already, but they've all been left-to-right languages like English. Instagram just announced that it has added Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi languages -- all of which read right to left. The three languages will be available on the Android version of Instagram first.
Samsung's Bixby assistant is finally available worldwide
Samsung has faced a tough slog getting Bixby to the masses, but now its voice assistant is accessible in more than 200 countries including the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa. It's been available in South Korea and the US since July, when it launched after months of delays. Part of Bixby's appeal is its positioning beyond that of a simple voice assistant. Samsung claims it learns over time, recognizing "natural language" to make interacting with your phone easier and more intuitive. It understands cross-application commands and thanks to deep integration it can be accessed without any interruptions to what you're already doing on-screen. So you can turn down screen brightness while scrolling through Facebook, for example. Users can also create custom voice commands. Instead of setting an alarm and turning on do-not-disturb mode individually, you could simply use "good night" as a shortcut.
Kano’s latest DIY kit turns motion into code
DIY computer company Kano has released another brightly-coloured addition to its learn-to-code arsenal: a motion sensor kit. The standalone product comes with the Kano App to teach would-be coders how to translate movement into data which can be applied to games, apps and music. The kit, which is available for $30/£30, includes a USB motion sensor which can connect to any Windows or Mac computer -- or the original Kano Computer kit -- and comes with an easy-to-follow storybook featuring beginner's coding challenges. Learn to code a hand-controlled version of the classic game Pong, for example, or make noise and mix tunes by "scratching" a DJ turntable.
'Tinder for friends' uses AI to block flirty messages
Making new friends as an adult is hard, and it's easy to find yourself relying on old college pals and work colleagues to bolster your social life, even if the former live on the other side of the country and the latter are, well, your work colleagues. Many an app has tried and largely failed to address this problem, but as any woman who's been brave enough to seek friends -- genuine platonic friends -- online will know, it's not long before your inbox is inundated with dire pickup lines, weak attempts at 'cheeky banter' and, of course, the ubiquitous dick pic. Enter Patook. Launching globally on July 7 on iPhone and Android, the app claims to make finding new friends easier and less traumatic thanks to an algorithm which detects and blocks flirty language.
Google Home and Assistant can speak Canadian French now
The first of several new languages for Google's Assistant AI is here, as users have noticed Canadian French as a language option. I was able to switch it on for my Google Home by looking for Assistant Language under device settings in its control app, while The Android Soul reports they could turn it on simply by saying "Ok Google, speak to me in French Canadian," however I could not get that to work. The new language is obviously there to get ready for the Google Home launch in Canada on the 26th, making it the first one Assistant supports outside of English. At Google's I/O event in May, the company announced that German, Brazilian-Portuguese and Japanese will be added this summer, followed by Italian, Spanish and Korean later in the year.
Facebook's new AI aims to destroy the language barrier
Is there anything AI can't make better? Artificial intelligence can recognize musical genres better than humans, improve our running performance and may soon become standard issue for the mobile devices in our pockets. Facebook, in fact, has found some stunning results in new research using convolutional neural networks (CNN), a type of artificial intelligence that uses the benefit of parallel processing to complete complex tasks. The social networking company's AI research team revealed research that shows these systems can outperform traditional language translation software by a factor of nine. In addition, the source code and trained systems are available under an open source license, making it easy for other researchers to verify and replicate the gains in their own work.
Samsung's emoji chat app helps people with language disorders
It seems like emoji has become a language of its own, but each symbol is really a stand-in for a wide array of thoughts and emotions. This shorthand can be useful for someone who struggles to digest written words -- like those with aphasia, a language disorder that impedes people's ability to read, talk and write. To help this group, Samsung developed Wemogee, a chat app that translates written phrases into emoji bursts to enable fluid conversation.
Google automatically translates local reviews when you travel
We all use user-generated reviews to figure out what points of interest are worth checking out. If you're traveling in a country where you don't speak the language, however, the reviews you rely on are usually in the local tongue. Google has a new feature to help you out. The company will now automatically translate reviews into your native language without any effort on your part.
Duolingo has a premium subscription, but lessons are still free
The idea that learning another language should be free is the core idea behind Duolingo. Over the past few years, the app has strived to make learning a new tongue convenient, portable and fun. Now the company's trying to turn its free language learning tools into a profitable business by introducing a premium service. Don't worry, though -- Duolingo Plus doesn't take away your free language course, it just gets rid of its ads.
MIT's app only needs a second to teach you a new language
You know the seconds and minutes you waste waiting for the elevator to arrive, for a friend to reply to an IM or for a website to load? A team of MIT CSAIL researchers believe you can put them to good use, so they created a series of apps called the WaitSuite that makes the most of those idle moments by helping you learn a new language. The tools can test your vocabulary without whisking you away to another app. For instance, if you're chatting with a friend, a flash card asking you about a word in the language you're learning will pop up within the IM itself. If you're waiting for a website to load, the card will appear within the browser.
Germany to use voice recognition to identify refugee origins
Germany will soon use voice recognition tech to help figure out exactly where refugees came from, according to Die Welt. Though the number of asylum seekers coming to the nation in 2016 dropped significantly to 280,000 from 890,000 in 2015, there was still a backlog of 430,000 applications at the beginning of 2017. Authorities from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) are therefore hoping the technology can help dialect experts to clear that number down.
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.
