Google Translate adds contextual translation options, more accessible app features and a new design.
Last year our CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced that Google would invest $1 billion in Africa over the next five years to support a range of initiatives, from improved connectivity to investment in startups, to help boost Africa’s digital transformation.
Africa’s internet economy has the potential to grow to $180 billion by 2025 – 5.2% of the continent’s GDP. To support this growth, over the last year we’ve made progress on helping to enable affordable access and on building products for every African user – helping businesses build their online presence, supporting entrepreneurs spur next-generation technologies, and helping nonprofits to improve lives across the continent.
We’d like to share how we’re delivering on our commitment and partnering with others – policymakers, non-profits, businesses and creators – to make the internet more useful to more people in Africa.
Today we’re announcing our intent to establish a Google Cloud region in South Africa – our first on the continent. South Africa will be joining Google Cloud’s global network of 35 cloud regions and 106 zones worldwide.
The future cloud region in South Africa will bring Google Cloud services closer to our local customers, enabling them to innovate and securely deliver faster, more reliable experiences to their own customers, helping to accelerate their growth. According to research by AlphaBeta Economics for Google Cloud, the South Africa cloud region will contribute more than a cumulative USD 2.1 billion to the country’s GDP, and will support the creation of more than 40,000 jobs by 2030.
Niral Patel, Director for Cloud in Africa announces Google's intention to establish Google's first Cloud region in Africa
Along with the cloud region, we are expanding our network through the Equiano subsea cable and building Dedicated Cloud Interconnect sites in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Lagos and Nairobi. In doing so, we are building full scale Cloud capability for Africa.
We continue to support African entrepreneurs in growing their businesses and developing their talent. Our recently announced second cohort of the Black Founders Fund builds on the success of last year’s cohort, who raised $97 million in follow-on funding and have employed more than 500 additional staff since they were selected. We’re also continuing our support of African small businesses through the Hustle Academy and Google Business Profiles, and helping job seekers learn skills through Developer Scholarships and Career Certifications.
We’ve also continued to support nonprofits working to improve lives in Africa, with a $40 million cash and in-kind commitment so far. Over the last year this has included:
Across all our initiatives, we continue to work closely with our partners – most recently with the UN to launch the Global Africa Business Initiative (GABI), aimed at accelerating Africa’s economic growth and sustainable development.
We recently announced plans to open the first African product development centre in Nairobi. The centre will develop and build better products for Africans and the world.
Today, we’re launching voice typing support for nine more African languages (isiNdebele, isiXhosa, Kinyarwanda, Northern Sotho, Swati, Sesotho, Tswana, Tshivenda and Xitsonga) in Gboard, the Google keyboard – while 24 new languages are now supported on Google Translate, including Lingala, which is spoken by more than 45 million people across Central Africa.
To make Maps more useful, Street View imagery in Kenya, South Africa, Senegal and Nigeria has had a refresh with nearly 300,000 more kilometres of imagery now helping people virtually explore and navigate neighbourhoods. We’re also extending the service to Rwanda, meaning that Street View is now available in 11 African countries.
In addition to expanding the AI Accra Research Centre earlier this year, theOpen Buildings Project, which mapped buildings across the African continent using machine learning and satellite imagery, is expanding to South and Southeast Asia and is a great example of the AI centre creating solutions for Africa that are useful across the world.
We remain committed to working with our partners in building for Africa together, and helping to unlock the benefits of the digital economy for more people by providing useful products, programmes and investments. We’re doing this by partnering with African organisations, businesses and entrepreneurs. It’s the talent and drive of the individuals in the countries, communities and businesses of Africa that will power Africa’s economic growth.
When my wife and I were flying home from a trip to France a few years ago, our seatmate had just spent a few months exploring the French countryside and staying in small inns. When he learned that I worked on Google Translate, he got excited. He told me Translate’s conversation mode helped him chat with his hosts about family, politics, culture and more. Thanks to Translate, he said, he connected more deeply with people around him while in France.
One of the earliest versions of the Google Translate app for Android.
We released our Android app in January 2010, just over a year after the first commercial Android device was launched. As people started using the new Translate app over the next few years, we added a number of features to improve their experience, including early versions of conversation mode, offline translation and translating handwritten or printed text.
Our Android app crossed 100 million installs exactly four years after we first launched it. In 2014, Google acquired QuestVisual, the maker of WordLens. Together with the WordLens team, Translate’s goal was to introduce an advanced visual translation experience in our app. Within eight months, the team delivered the ability to instantly translate text using a phone camera, just as the app reached 200 million installs.
As it approached 300 million installs, Translate improved in two major ways. First, revamping Translate's conversation mode enabled two people to converse with each other despite speaking different languages, helping people in their everyday lives, as featured in the video From Syria to Canada.
Second, Google Translate's rollout of Neural Machine Translation, well underway when the app reached 500 million installs, greatly improved the fluency of our translations across text, speech and visual translation. As the installs continued to grow, we compressed those advanced models down to a size that can run on a phone. Offline translations made these high-quality translations available to anyone even when there is no network or connectivity is poor.
Transcribe, our long-form speech translation feature, launched when we reached 850 million installs. We partnered with the Pixel Buds team to offer streaming speech translations on top of our Transcribe feature, for more natural conversations between people speaking different languages. During this time, we improved the accuracy and increased the number of supported languages for offline translation.
Aside from these features, our engineering team has spent countless hours on bringing our users a simple-to-use experience on a stable app, keeping up with platform needs and rigorously testing changes before they launch. As we celebrate this milestone and all our users whose experiences make the work meaningful, we also celebrate our engineers who build with care, our designers who fret over every pixel and our product team who bring focus.
Our mission is to enable everyone, everywhere to understand the world and express themselves across languages. Looking beyond one billion installs, we’re looking forward to continually improving translation quality and user experiences, supporting more languages and helping everyone communicate, every day.
Recently, I was at my friend’s family gathering, where her grandmother told a story from her childhood. I could see that she was excited to share it with everyone but there was a problem—she told the story in Spanish, a language that I don’t understand. I pulled out Google Translate to transcribe the speech as it was happening. As she was telling the story, the English translation appeared on my phone so that I could follow along—it fostered a moment of understanding that would have otherwise been lost. And now anyone can do this—starting today, you can use the Google Translate Android app to transcribe foreign language speech as it’s happening.
Transcribe will be rolling out in the next few days with support for any combination of the following eight languages: English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.
To try the transcribe feature, go to your Translate app on Android, and make sure you have the latest updates from the Play store. Tap on the “Transcribe” icon from the home screen and select the source and target languages from the language dropdown at the top. You can pause or restart transcription by tapping on the mic icon. You also can see the original transcript, change the text size or choose a dark theme in the settings menu.
On the left: redesigned home screen. On the right: how to change the settings for a comfortable read.
We’ll continue to make speech translations available in a variety of situations. Right now, the transcribe feature will work best in a quiet environment with one person speaking at a time. In other situations, the app will still do its best to provide the gist of what's being said. Conversation mode in the app will continue to help you to have a back and forth translated conversation with someone.
Try it out and give us feedback on how we can be better.
Millions of people around the world use Google Translate, whether in a verbal conversation, or while navigating a menu or reading a webpage online. Translate learns from existing translations, which are most often found on the web. Languages without a lot of web content have traditionally been challenging to translate, but through advancements in our machine learning technology, coupled with active involvement of the Google Translate Community, we’ve added support for five languages: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. These languages, spoken by more than 75 million people worldwide, are the first languages we’ve added to Google Translate in four years, and expand the capabilities of Google Translate to 108 languages.
Translate supports both text translation and website translation for each of these languages. In addition, Translate supports virtual keyboard input for Kinyarwanda, Tatar and Uyghur. Below you can see our team motto, “Enable everyone, everywhere to understand the world and express themselves across languages,” translated into the five new languages.
If you speak any of these languages and are interested in helping, please join the Google Translate Community and improve our translations.
Millions of people around the world use Google Translate, whether in a verbal conversation, or while navigating a menu or reading a webpage online. Translate learns from existing translations, which are most often found on the web. Languages without a lot of web content have traditionally been challenging to translate, but through advancements in our machine learning technology, coupled with active involvement of the Google Translate Community, we’ve added support for five languages: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. These languages, spoken by more than 75 million people worldwide, are the first languages we’ve added to Google Translate in four years, and expand the capabilities of Google Translate to 108 languages.
Translate supports both text translation and website translation for each of these languages. In addition, Translate supports virtual keyboard input for Kinyarwanda, Tatar and Uyghur. Below you can see our team motto, “Enable everyone, everywhere to understand the world and express themselves across languages,” translated into the five new languages.
If you speak any of these languages and are interested in helping, please join the Google Translate Community and improve our translations.
When you’re traveling somewhere without access to the internet or don’t want to use your data plan, you can still use the Google Translate app on Android and iOS when your phone is offline. Offline translation is getting better: now, in 59 languages, offline translation is 12 percent more accurate, with improved word choice, grammar and sentence structure. In some languages like Japanese, Korean, Thai, Polish, and Hindi the quality gain is more than 20 percent.
It can be particularly hard to pronounce and spell words in languages that are written in a script you're not familiar with. To help you in these cases, Translate offers transliteration, which gives an equivalent spelling in the alphabet you're used to. For example, when you translate “hello” to Hindi, you will see “नमस्ते” and “namaste” in the translation card where “namaste” is the transliteration of “नमस्ते.” This is a great tool for learning how to communicate in a different language, and Translate has offline transliteration support for 10 new languages: Arabic, Bengali, Gujrati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
To try our improved offline translation and transliteration, go to your Translate app on Android or iOS. If you do not have the app, you can download it. Make sure you have the latest updates from the Play or App store. If you’ve used offline translation before, you’ll see a banner on your home screen that will take you to the right place to update your offline files. If not, go to your offline translation settings and tap the arrow next to the language name to download that language. Now you’ll be ready to translate text whether you’re online or not.
When you’re traveling somewhere without access to the internet or don’t want to use your data plan, you can still use the Google Translate app on Android and iOS when your phone is offline. Offline translation is getting better: now, in 59 languages, offline translation is 12 percent more accurate, with improved word choice, grammar and sentence structure. In some languages like Japanese, Korean, Thai, Polish, and Hindi the quality gain is more than 20 percent.
It can be particularly hard to pronounce and spell words in languages that are written in a script you're not familiar with. To help you in these cases, Translate offers transliteration, which gives an equivalent spelling in the alphabet you're used to. For example, when you translate “hello” to Hindi, you will see “नमस्ते” and “namaste” in the translation card where “namaste” is the transliteration of “नमस्ते.” This is a great tool for learning how to communicate in a different language, and Translate has offline transliteration support for 10 new languages: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
To try our improved offline translation and transliteration, go to your Translate app on Android or iOS. If you do not have the app, you can download it. Make sure you have the latest updates from the Play or App store. If you’ve used offline translation before, you’ll see a banner on your home screen that will take you to the right place to update your offline files. If not, go to your offline translation settings and tap the arrow next to the language name to download that language. Now you’ll be ready to translate text whether you’re online or not.
Google Maps has made travel easier than ever before. You can scout out a neighborhood before booking a hotel, get directions on the go and even see what nearby restaurants the locals recommend thanks to auto-translated reviews.
But when you're in a foreign country where you don't speak or read the language, getting around can still be difficult -- especially when you need to speak with someone. Think about that anxiety-inducing time you tried to talk to a taxi driver, or that moment you tried to casually ask a passerby for directions.
To help, we're bringing Google Maps and Google Translate closer together. This month, we’re adding a new translator feature that enables your phone to speak out a place's name and address in the local lingo. Simply tap the new speaker button next to the place name or address, and Google Maps will say it out loud, making your next trip that much simpler. And when you want to have a deeper conversation, Google Maps will quickly link you to the Google Translate app.
This text-to-speech technology automatically detects what language your phone is using to determine which places you might need help translating. For instance, if your phone is set to English and you’re looking at a place of interest in Tokyo, you’ll see the new speaker icon next to the place’s name and address so you can get a real-time translation.
The new feature will be rolling out this month on Android and iOS with support for 50 languages and more on the way.
Google Maps has made travel easier than ever before. You can scout out a neighborhood before booking a hotel, get directions on the go and even see what nearby restaurants the locals recommend thanks to auto-translated reviews.
But when you're in a foreign country where you don't speak or read the language, getting around can still be difficult -- especially when you need to speak with someone. Think about that anxiety-inducing time you tried to talk to a taxi driver, or that moment you tried to casually ask a passerby for directions.
To help, we're bringing Google Maps and Google Translate closer together. This month, we’re adding a new translator feature that enables your phone to speak out a place's name and address in the local lingo. Simply tap the new speaker button next to the place name or address, and Google Maps will say it out loud, making your next trip that much simpler. And when you want to have a deeper conversation, Google Maps will quickly link you to the Google Translate app.
This text-to-speech technology automatically detects what language your phone is using to determine which places you might need help translating. For instance, if your phone is set to English and you’re looking at a place of interest in Tokyo, you’ll see the new speaker icon next to the place’s name and address so you can get a real-time translation.
The new feature will be rolling out this month on Android and iOS with support for 50 languages and more on the way.
