Google Will Undertake Ambitious “1,000 Languages Initiative”
Google Translate has come a long way since it launched nearly twenty years ago in 2006. What was once a trivial translator tool barely capable of helping kids cheat on elementary school Spanish tests has evolved to an indispensable quick hit Rosetta Stone for travelers and students alike. Well, some of them at least. Critics of Google, and other western translation tools have, for years, claimed those tools failed to provide anywhere near the same quality of products to less widely spoken languages.
In an effort to address some of those shortcomings, Google on Wednesday announced a multi-year effort to create an AI language model capable of supporting 1,000 of the world’s most spoken languages. As part of that initiative, Google’s developing a so-called Universal Speech Model which it says is trained on 400 different languages. Speaking at the AI@ event, Google Brain leader Zoubin Ghahramani said that Universal Speech Model represents, “largest language model coverage seen in a speech to date.”
