Microsoft on Thursday announced to bring in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Neural Networks to improve language translation for Hindi, Bengali and Tamil.
“Microsoft celebrates the diversity of languages in India and wants to make the vast Internet even more accessible. We have supported Indian languages in computing for over two decades, and, more recently, have made significant strides on voice-based access and machine translation across languages,” said Sundar Srinivasan, General Manager-AI and Research, Microsoft India.
Deep Neural Networks is said to improve the real time qualilty of language translation and will sound natural.This is engineered to bring in more accuracy. Users can avail this benefit while surfing on any website with the Microsoft edge browser. This will be available on Binge Search, Binge Translator website.
Before Deep Neural Networks, in 2000’s, Microsoft used traditional Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to translate global and Indian languages.”However, Indian languages, constituting of Dravidian and Aryan subdivisions, are complicated. The complexities increase while translating languages for India, where 29 different states have 22 official languages,” Microsoft said in a statement.
This translation feature is also made available in Microsoft Office 365 products such as Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook. The Microsoft App is also available on Android and iOS. It is said to translate languages from text, speech and even photos.
“Six Indian languages are part of top 20 global languages by population. Ironically, these languages are not on top of the digital content list. There’s not enough material on Internet that we could use to train the system,” explained Krishna Doss Mohan, Senior Programne Manager, Microsoft India.
In order to break the language barrier in our country, Microsoft has been working on this project since 1998 as “Project Bhasha”. The project has hit 40 million hits to date. “We have come a long way since then — supporting text input in all 22 constitutionally-recognized Indian language across our products, and Windows interface support in 12 languages,” the company said.