Paulo Coelho said that “There is a language beyond words”. And it is true, because it is possible that two people who speak different languages can communicate with each other, and we are not talking about using English as a universal language, but through bodily expressions.
But Google goes further and wants us to also be able to communicate through words. For all these reasons, the company has released a piece of news that offers a ray of hope for communication between countries, tribes and urban centers around the world: expand your language portfolio by using Artificial Intelligence.
The company has declared its public commitment to multiply its registration tenfold and will admit up to 1,000 languages in its simultaneous translation services through the Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It will be the thousand most spoken languages in the world. This will make the information more accessible and effective.
Google Principal Investigator Jeff Dean at an Artificial Intelligence main event in New York said: “More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, and today only a few are well represented online. Language is central to the way people communicate and make sense of the world.”
Can you imagine what this would have meant for Neytiri Omaticaya and Jake Sully in Avatar? Well, without a doubt, a real discovery because surely one of the new languages that Google will register would be that of Pandora!
If Google is characterized by something, it is for being ambitious, in such a way that it prefers to take a few more years to materialize this project but that when it is launched it will be unbeatable. They recently added 24 new languages to their platform Google Translate and enabled voice typing for nine more African languages in gboard.
Artificial Intelligence is unstoppable
One of its latest most innovative tools is the universal voice model (USM) who trains in more than 400 languagesoffering the largest voice coverage to date.
But this not all. The company is not holding back in its linguistic ambition and is partnering with communities around the world to obtain voice data from different dialects, including with local governments, NGOs and academic institutions in South Asia.
Apart from Google we find other important technology companies such as Goal they are working on great language models. In July they announced an Artificial Intelligence model; the No Language Left Behindwhich can be translated into 200 languages.
This Meta campaign aims to bring content to communities that are not represented on the web, so it includes translations for 55 languages Africans. It represents a significant advance by having less than 25 African languages compatible with currently used translation tools.
Artificial Intelligence is fully internalized in our day to day. Google, Apple and other providers offer navigation services in the transportation that use AI to interpret the metrics they receive and provide us with real-time traffic information. It is also applicable for taxi companies such as Uber.
Our experience in social networks it also depends on the AI. And it is that these offer us news feeds or advertising products based on our tastes or search history.
And of course, in the mobile phones. You all know integrated intelligent voice assistants like Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. AI is also being applied to mobile devices to control aspects such as battery management or event notifications.
