When the new year has only just begun, it is time to take stock of what 2022 left us on the table in the computer field. The development of the Artificial intelligence was a pointer and although everything seemed to be offered as simple algorithms that would help us in our day to day, little by little it has been making its way and becoming a necessary tool.
Google, in its eternal battle with Microsoft, continues to take steps to position itself above. The news is that the Chatbot issue is no longer enough and its debate of which is better, now Google has gone a step further and prepare the never seen. The company of the popular search engine wants internationalize Artificial Intelligence.
The Artificial Intelligence of 1,000 languages
The company that was born in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is already studying to build an Artificial Intelligence language model that allows speak 1,000 different languages. In this sense, the first steps are taking place and that is that Google has already shared information about the Universal Speech Model (USM), a system that the company literally describes as a “critical first step” to achieve its objectives.
Google is aware of the importance of languages and such is the case that it is already an expert in translation, since its tool Google translator It has more than 500 million visits every day of the year. Currently the translator is capable of working with nearly 100 different languages, so the tool can be used by more than 60% of the world’s population.
In line with the above, Jeff Dean, Google’s principal investigator of the project, stated that: “The language is essential for people to communicate and make sense of the world. But more than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, and only a few are well represented digitally today.
The boom in languages is a reality, and Meta also presented its NLLB 200, a powerful Artificial Intelligence capable of translating 200 different languages. Now Google intends to surpass Meta and considers that 200 languages are scarce, and in November 2022, the company already announced its intention to create a language model that would be compatible with the 1,000 most spoken languages in the world. This way information will be accessible to alland not only for the most advanced countries.
The truth is that Google has already begun to implement its new linguistic models in several of its products, as is the case with Google Search. These models have the ability to perform many activities such as language generation and language translation.
The project that offers great possibilities
Google has clarified that it has not yet determined where it will apply the functionality of this linguistic model, however it does hopes to be able to use it in several of its products where you can give great results to users, products such as Google Translate, YouTube subtitles and others.
In this regard, Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google AI, stated that “one of the really interesting things about large linguistic models and language research in general is that they can do so many different things. The same linguistic model can code the commands of a robot, solve mathematical problems or translate. The really interesting thing about linguistic models is that they are becoming repositories of many knowledgeand by probing them in different ways you can arrive at different bits of useful functionality.”
In the same way, the American company has revealed its USM model, described by themselves as “a family of next-generation voice models.” The USM has 2 billion parameters trained in 12 million hours of speech and 28 million sentences in more than 300 languages. This model, which is already used by YouTube for subtitling, is compatible with automatic voice recognition, so it will automatically detect and translate languages.
Artificial Intelligence and Google are unstoppable Currently, we will see how far the American company is able to go in tasks of surpassing its main competitors and positioning itself on the cusp of development.