Microsoft enhances real-time translation for three Indian languages

To make technology accessible and productive for all Indians, Microsoft on Wednesday announced the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to improve real-time language translation for Hindi, Bengali and Tamil languages.

This technology will help users in getting results that are more accurate and natural 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.

"We are committed to empower every citizen and business in India by bringing the power of AI into their daily life and become a driving force for Digital India," Sundar Srinivasan, General Manager - AI and Research at Microsoft India, said in a statement.

"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," Srinivasan added.

The translator is equipped with "TrueText" -- a satellite DNN based system that filters repetition, pauses, and indifferent words, enhancing the translation`s contextual appropriateness.

DNN have 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).

The technology is also available for Android and iOS devices users through Microsoft Translator app which can recognise and translate languages from text, speech and even photos.

For its partners and customers, Microsoft also provides APIs on Azure that they can use in their products.

According to Microsoft, while facing complexities for translating Indian languages, especially of Dravidian and Aryan subdivisions and a dearth of digital content in Indian languages, DNN-powered translation systems have shown at least a 20 per cent improvement in translation quality for all Indic languages which are currently supported.

The company also supports text input in all 22 constitutionally recognised Indian languages across its products and Windows interface in 12 languages.