Moscow, June 27 (Agency) US tech giant Google said on Thursday that with the use of artificial intelligence it has added 110 languages to its translation service Google Translate, including those spoken in Russia. “We’re using AI to expand the variety of languages we support. Thanks to our PaLM 2 large language model, we’re rolling out 110 new languages to Google Translate, our largest expansion ever,” the company said in a statement. The added languages include those spoken across Europe, Asia, Africa and other regions. Portuguese, Punjabi (Shahmukhi), most spoken in Pakistan, and the Berber language Tamazight (Amazigh), among many others, are now represented in the translation service, the company said. The expanded list of languages includes over 10 languages spoken in Russia, including abkhaz, avar, bashkir, buryat, chechen, chuvash, crimean tatar, komi, meadow-eastern mari, ossetic, tuvan, udmurt and yakut. “From Cantonese to Q’eqchi’, these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population. Some are major world languages with over 100 million speakers.
Others are spoken by small communities of Indigenous people, and a few have almost no native speakers but active revitalization efforts. About a quarter of the new languages come from Africa, representing our largest expansion of African languages to date,” the statement read, adding that along with this expansion, Google launches a campaign to develop AI models to support the world’s 1,000 most spoken languages. At the moment, Google is actively engaged in research and development in the AI field. The company is working on the new Search Generative Experience initiative, which is using AI to improve efficacy of the company’s search engine. Another project is Google Bard, a chatbot analogue to the renowned ChatGPT. Google, with its search engine, is part of the Alphabet holding company. This also includes Android and YouTube, Verily Life Sciences, Calico, Sidewalk Labs, Nest, Google Ventures, CapitalG and X.