Google's new service claims to translate almost as well as humans

PanARMENIAN.Net - Google says it has a new technique for providing artificial intelligence-assisted language translation. The company’s AI team calls it the Google Neural Machine Translation system, or GNMT, and it initially provided a less resource-intensive way to ingest a sentence in one language and produce that same sentence in another language. Instead of digesting each word or phrase as a standalone unit, as prior methods do, GNMT takes in the entire sentence as a whole, The Verge reports.

"The advantage of this approach is that it requires fewer engineering design choices than previous Phrase-Based translation systems," write Quoc V. Le and Mike Schuster, researchers on the Google Brain team.

When the technique was first employed, it was able to match the accuracy of those existing translation systems. Over time, however, GNMT has proved capable of both producing superior results and working at the speed required of Google’s consumer apps and services. These improvements are detailed in a new paper published this week.