Translation from current language Apps are like self-driving cars: incredibly useful, promising, nearing maturity, and almost entirely machine-powered. It’s amazing that the technology exists.
Still, machine translation is still sometimes clumsy, if not uncomfortable.
Consider a recent conversation I had with my neighbor, Andre, who emigrated from Russia last year. Speaking little to no English, Andre is navigating the American dream almost exclusively through Google TranslateThe most popular voice-to-speech translation app, first launched 10 years ago.
Through his phone, Andrew and I can have surprisingly deep conversations about where he’s from, how he thinks, how we can help each other, and what he hopes for. But on more than one occasion, Google Translate failed to communicate what Andre was trying to express, forcing us both to shrug and smile through the crisis.
However, as computers become smarter, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others hope to completely eliminate the language barrier that Andre and I shared that day. But it will take faster neural machine learning for that to happen, which “could take a few years,” admitted one developer I spoke to.
Not that the wait matters. In fact, many consumers are surprised to learn how good today’s translation apps are. For example, this video shows three Microsoft researchers using the company’s live translation software to hold a conversation in multiple languages. The video is seven years old. But when I showed it to some friends, they reacted as if they had seen the future.
“The technology surrounding translation has come a long way in a very short time,” says Erica Richter, spokesperson for Deep, an award-winning machine translation service that licenses its technology to Zendesk, Coursera, Hitachi, and other companies. “But this has not happened in parallel with consumer awareness.”
I am an example of this. Although I’ve been writing about technology for almost 20 years, I had no idea how skilled Google Translate is. Apple Translator, Microsoft Translatorand Amazon Alexa were until I started researching this story after my fateful encounter with Andre. The technology is not yet capable of instant translations as expected from a live human translator. But voice-to-speech, text-to-speech, or photo-to-text translation in turn is incredibly powerful.
And it’s getting better every year. “Translate is one of the products we created that uses artificial intelligence entirely,” says a Google spokesperson. “Since the launch of Google’s Neural Machine in 2016, we’ve seen the biggest improvements in accuracy when translating full sentences rather than just phrases.”
At the same time, half of the six apps I tested for this story sometimes fail on even basic greetings. For example, when I asked Siri and Microsoft Translator to convert “Olá, tudo bem?” from Portuguese to English, both responded correctly: “Hello, how are you?” Google Translate and Amazon Alexa, on the other hand, returned a more literal and awkward message: “Hello, is everything okay?” or “Hello, is everything okay?” It’s not a total failure. But there are enough nuances to cause hesitation or confusion on the part of the listener.
