Most of the new languages are spoken by at least one million people, with several spoken by hundreds of millions. Prior to this expansion, Google Translate supported 133 languages. The company's Isaac Caswell highlighted the challenges of finding data and training models for languages like Cantonese that often overlap with Mandarin in writing.
Key takeaways:
- Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, marking its biggest expansion ever.
- The company's PaLM 2 AI language model was instrumental in learning these new languages, especially those related to each other.
- The list of newly-supported languages includes Cantonese, which has been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate.
- About a quarter of the new languages come from Africa, and most of the new languages are spoken by at least one million people.