It seems that Google isn’t the only developer powering their translation app with neural network technology. Microsoft Translator also recently upgraded to better understand full sentences and provide more human-sounding output.




The neural network based translation is now working with some languages in the Microsoft Translator mobile app, desktop app, and Skype Translator. Translations take full sentences into account, can handle language variations with advanced pattern recognition, and gradually learn subtleties of languages over time. Nine languages are currently supported by the new speech API:

Arabic

Chinese Mandarin

English

French

German

Italian

Brazilian Portuguese

Russian

Spanish



The neural networks also power Japanese text translations. This update is a major boon for Microsoft in its translation arms race with Google and couldn’t have been timed better. If you want to know how neural network based translation compares to the previously used Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) technology, you can see for yourself here at this web site.


Microsoft Translator launching Neural Network based translations for all its speech languages | Microsoft Blog