Google wants artificial intelligence in a thousand languages

Google said Wednesday it wants to develop artificial intelligence using the world’s over a thousand spoken languages ​​as tech giants vie for control of the next online battlefield.

Data is essential to advances in artificial intelligence, and Google and its big tech competitors want to leverage information to help improve the performance of products and make them more available to the widest possible audience.

“Imagine a new Internet user in Africa who speaks Wolofs… uses his phone to ask where the nearest pharmacy is,” said Johan Schalkwyk, a Google researcher.

Such attitudes “we take for granted,” Schalkwyk told reporters, adding that languages ​​”are not available to everyone in the world.”

According to Schalkwyk, there are more than 7,000 languages ​​worldwide.

However, Google only offers its translations for just over 130 translations.

The search engine giant aims to expand this exponentially and wants to mine data In new languages ​​not only from texts available on the Internet, but also from videos, images and speech.

The group is also looking to collect audio clips for languages ​​that may not have much written material available.

With progress on the project, which is estimated to take several years, Google plans to incorporate its progress into its products, including YouTube and Google Translate.

Facebook parent Meta earlier this year announced a similar plan called No Language Left Behind designed to create translation systems to cover hundreds of the world’s languages.

© 2022 AFP