Microsoft introduces AI to enhance translation in Tamil, Hindi, Bengali

With Deep Neural Networks-powered language translation, the results are more accurate and the sound more natural. “Microsoft celebrates the diversity of languages in India and wants to make the vast Internet even more accessible. We have 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, FM-AI and Research, Microsoft India.

“Today’s launch is a testament of our quest to bring cutting-edge Machine Learning (ML) technology to democratise access to information for everyone in India,” Srinivasan added. Users can avail the benefits of Deep Neural Networks-enhanced Indian language translation 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 Microsoft Translator app in Android and iOS can recognise and translate languages from text, speech and even photos. Since early 2000s, Microsoft has been pioneering the traditional Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) paradigm to translate global as well as Indian languages. The incorporation of Deep Neural Networks into translating complex Indian languages has been engineered to bring more accuracy and fluency to translation. 

While SMT is limited to translating a word within the local context of a few surrounding words, Deep Neural Networks operate differently as it has 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). 

For accurate translations, the system demands millions of parallel sentences in each language pair, in all permutations and combinations. “However, Indian languages, constituting of Dravidian and Aryan subdivisions, are complicated. The complexities increase while translating languages for India, where 29 different states have 22 official languages,” Microsoft said in a statement. 

Despite the obstacles, Deep Neural Networks-powered translation systems have shown significant improvement in both automatic and human evaluation metrics. 

“More specifically, we have witnessed at least 20 per cent improvement in translation quality for all Indic languages currently supported by Microsoft,” the company said.