More than 500 million people around the world use Google to translate words and phrases, but the Mountain View company is nothing if not ambitious. On Monday, it announced the addition of 30 languages and locales to its suite of web- and phone-based translation apps, bringing the total number of supported languages to 119.
Google says the expanded support covers more than one billion speakers.
The additions include Georgian, African dialects of Swahili and Amharic, and Indian languages like Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Gujarati. Google said it worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, training machine learning models to understand the languages’ nuances.
“[We asked] them to read common phrases,” Daan van Esch, a technical program manager at Google’s Speech division, said in a blog post. “This process trained our machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and to improve their accuracy when exposed to more examples over time.”
The languages are available across Google’s range of translation apps, including Translate and Gboard. In the case of the latter keyboard app, though, users have to manually enable the language via the apps’ Voice Typing and Voice Search settings.
New languages aren’t the only thing heading to Google’s speech recognition. Starting Monday, Gboard is gaining support for “emoji-to-text” — you can say something like “winky face emoji,” and it’ll paste the relevant emoji for you. Google is also upgrading its Cloud Speech API, its voice transcription developer toolkit, with expanded support for audio timestamps and files up to three hours in length.
“[The] new expanded language support […] enables users in more countries to use speech to access products and services that up until now have never been available to them,” Dan Aharon, product manager at Google’s Cloud Platform, said in a blog post.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.