Google Translate improves offline translation

Google just updated its Translate app to improve its offline translation capabilities. It promises better word choice, grammar, and sentence structure. Google claimed offline translation for the 59 available languages is now 12 percent more accurate. And for specific languages — like Japanese, Korean, Thai, Polish, and Hindi — the quality of the translations are 20 percent better. 

In case you need it, Google Translate also offers transliteration to help with pronunciation. Google also added offline support for 10 more languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

Real-time Google Translate coming to all Google Assistant-enabled headphones

One of the nifty Google Pixel exclusives is coming to more Android devices. Google updated the support page for the Pixel Buds to say that the real-time translation, which was an exclusive for the Pixel Buds paired with a Google Pixel phone, is coming to all Google Assistant-enabled headphones and Android devices. According to Droid Life, the change doesn’t seem surprising as the LG Tone SE and the Type-C Pixel earbuds that come with the Pixel 3 both have support for the feature.

Right now, there aren’t a lot of Google Assistant-optimized headphones. But if you have the Pixel Buds, Bose Quiet Control 35 II, Sony WI-1000X, Sony WH-1000XM2, Sony WH-1000XM3 and a couple more models by JBL, you can try out to see if it works. Just say “Hey Google, help me speak X” and see if it responds.

Source: XDA-Developers

Google Translate adds 13 more languages it can visually translate

Google’s handy Translate app is now supporting close to 50 languages it can support when it comes to visual translations. This week, the company adds 13 more languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Punjabi, Tamil, and Nepali, to name a few. If you want to use visual translation, you just need to navigate to the camera icon on the app. This will prompt you to line up the text you want to translate into the photo’s box. The app will scan the text using a machine learning technique known as Neural Machine Translation. This will give you a translation (hopefully a correct one) into the language of your choice. Both the Android and iOS versions of the app will be getting support for these additional languages.

Source: The Verge

Google boosts offline translation chops of Translate app with AI

Google shows how NMT improves the app's translating capabilities

Google Translate’s latest update brings a boost of intelligence (the artificial kind) when you use it offline. The company is making its previously online-only neural machine translation (NMT) technology available for offline use. What NMT technology does is that it takes a more nuanced approach to translating. It looks at entire phrases instead of using individual words so it can create more precise translations of phrases.

It’ll be coming to 59 languages in the coming days and each language set won’t take up much space as download file sizes are between 35MB and 45MB. You can download these language packs by going to the offline translation settings on the Translate app and tapping on the arrow next to the language you want to download. If you’ve downloaded this in the past, a banner will appear on the home screen to let you know where you can update your offline files.

Source: Gizmodo UK + CNET