New features for mobile Microsoft Translator apps
In other machine-learning-based translation news, Microsoft today announced that it was rolling out two new features for its mobile Microsoft Translator apps. They include a new Android-based translation engine that uses artificial intelligence and support for image-based translations using optical character recognition technology on iOS.
Instant visual translation is when you point your Google Translate app at a sign or text on a page and it instantly translates the text to your language. Here is an animated GIF of it in action:
Google launched this feature in 2015 supporting English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, then adding Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai.
The picture mode, i.e., not instant translation, works with 37 languages.
Both Microsoft and Google also provide conversation-based translation support, and last year Microsoft’s Skype rolled out a preview version of near-real-time translations for spoken conversations in four languages: English, Spanish, Italian and Mandarin Chinese.
To find out more:
