Technology major Microsoft announced the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to improve real-time language translation for Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil.
This technology will help users in getting more accurate and natural results while surfing the internet across any website on the Microsoft Edge browser, on Bing search, Bing Translator website, as well Microsoft Office 365 products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Skype.
The translator is equipped with TrueText, a satellite DNN based system that filters repetition, pauses, and indifferent words, enhancing the translation’s contextual appropriateness. The technology is also available for Android and iOS users through Microsoft Translator app which can recognize and translate languages from text, speech and even photos.
Microsoft also provides APIs on Azure for its partners and customers for use in their products.
“We 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 & Research, Microsoft India.
Deep Neural Networks-powered translation systems have shown a significant improvement in both automatic and human evaluation metrics. More specifically, there has been at least a 20 percent improvement in translation quality for all Indic languages currently supported by Microsoft.
Deep Neural Networks have the capability of encoding more granular concepts like gender (feminine, masculine, neutral), politeness level (slang, casual, written, formal), and type of word (verb, noun, adjective).
Microsoft supports text input in all 22 constitutionally recognized Indian languages across its products, and Windows interface in 12 languages, and has a dedicated portal that provides computing tools for Indic languages called Bhashaindia.com.