Google translations get a major boost from artificial intelligence

Google just made a major upgrade to its Translate app.

The company is now using a new technology called neural machine translation — which aims to make computer-generated translations more similar to those done by humans — to power its translations in seven new languages. Google says the update should make translations in those languages much more accurate and easier to understand.

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The company previously rolled out this technology for Chinese to English translations in September. Now, Google is using the same technology to power translations to and from English in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. These languages, along with Chinese, make up more than a third of all translations on Google Translate, the company says.

At first glance, the Translate app won't look any different than before. Where users will notice the difference, though, is in the quality of the translations. That's because rather than translating sentences and phrases word by word, the machine learning technology allows the app to translate entire sentences at once. This results in a translation that's much more accurate and more similar to how humans actually speak. You can see the difference in action in the image below.

Image: google

"With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined," Google's product lead for Translate, Barak Turovsky, wrote in a blog post. During a press event at Google's San Francisco office on Tuesday, Turovsky said the company hopes to eventually use the same technology to power translations for all of the languages Translate supports.

The Translate app isn't the only place where Google is using artificial intelligence to make translations better. The company also showed off a new experimental app called "Thing Translator" that can recognize objects you point a smartphone camera at and translate them into different languages. 

Part of Google's new AI Experiments, the app uses Google's computer vision software as well as Google Translate APIs.

During its event Tuesday, Google also announced two major new hires who together will run the company's machine -learning business: Fei-Fei Li, who previously ran the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford, and Jia Li, who was head of research at Snapchat-maker Snap Inc.