Applications like Google Translate are life savers when it comes to dealing with an unknown language within the country or even when one is travelling abroad. The app, which was developed in 2015, can translate 27 different languages. Google Translate has been upgraded and starting this week, the app will be capable of visually translating 13 new languages by using the camera on your smartphone.
In addition to Arabic and Hindi, the other languages which have been added are Punjabi, Bengali, Vietnamese, Thai, Gujarati, Kannada, Nepali, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, making the total number of supported languages 50. Users can access the feature in the Translate app by navigating to the camera icon on the home screen and the app will then prompt the user to line up the text he/she is attempting to translate and take a photo.
After that, the app will scan the text with the use of a machine learning technique known as Neural Machine Translation that uses a large artificial neural network to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words, typically modelling entire sentences in a single integrated model. The sequence is finally translated into the language of the user’s choice.
The new additions will be available on both the iOS and Android versions of the app, and have already started rolling out.
