Google Translate is celebrating its 20th birthday and introducing one of its most requested features

Practicing pronunciation with the help of artificial intelligence

In its Translator application for Android, Google has started to introduce a new functionality that enables users to practice pronunciation. The feature is currently available in the US and India for English, Spanish and Hindi.

This tool uses artificial intelligence to analyze the user’s speech and give him instant feedback on what to change to perfect his pronunciation. According to the official announcement, Google has has been using artificial intelligence for years to recognize “tricky idioms, local slang and the subtle context of local languages.”

The company states that users who regularly try the new option use it “for speech practice activities, which include interactive scenarios that help people build confidence to speak naturally in real-world situations.”

From humble beginnings to a global tool

More than a billion people use Google Translate every month, and the service translates more than a billion words every month. It supports about 250 languages ​​and more than 60,000 possible language pairs, covering 95 percent of the world’s population. It is interesting that the most used language pair is English-Spanish, while the most recently translated phrase is “thank you”.

Google Translate has had a long journey. The service initially used statistical machine translation (SMT), which was based on the analysis of huge amounts of existing translations, which often resulted in clumsy and literal translations.

A significant step forward occurred in 2016 with the transition to neural machine translation (NMT). This system translates entire sentences at once, taking the context into account, resulting in significantly more accurate and natural translations. Today’s versions, additionally supported by advanced AI models like Gemini, represent a new step in understanding linguistic nuances.