Google Translate will soon have real-time conversation transcription and translation functionality. The firm demonstrated the functionality on Tuesday January 28, 2020. The operation of the system, based on AI, is particularly sophisticated.
Google took advantage of an event on artificial intelligence in San Francisco to talk about the future of Google Translate. The firm demonstrated a much awaited functionality: the transcription and translation of conversations in real time. According to Google, this feature would be implemented on Android “soon”, without further details.
Concretely, when you are in the middle of a conversation, a class, or hear a speech in another language, it becomes possible to hold your smartphone and see a transcript of everything that is said in your language displayed. direct. Transcription does not take place locally – an internet connection is required.
Coming soon on Android
Google explains that real-time audio translation is indeed much more complex than translating text. Our colleagues from The Verge also specify that the transcription will not work from audio files at first. Although it is still possible to record a conversation and read it on an external source, and to approach the smartphone.
Google goes further to improve the quality of the final translation. AI is trained to continually assess the meaning of the sentence as a whole and the context. So the AI goes so far as to insert punctuation marks, and corrects certain choices of words that do not have any meaning in the context of the sentence.
At this point, according to Google, the transcription thus offers a “correct approximation” of what is said. The firm points out that the models will become more precise over time.