According to available information, the entire world population speaks more than 7 thousand different languages ​​and dialects. However, existing automatic translation services, especially Google Translate, cover a maximum of 130 major languages ​​and soon there will be little to maintain leading positions in this part of the knowledge space.

Last week, representatives of the Google company announced that it has started working on a new artificial intelligence system that will have a thousand different languages. “After the introduction of such a system, some of the African residents will be able to ask their phone for the nearest pharmacy in Zulu, they will be understood and receive an answer in the same language,” says Johan Schalkwyk. “These kinds of things, long familiar to people who speak basic languages, are still out of reach for a sizable portion of humanity. And we’ll fix that soon,” the researcher from Google said.

Gathering material to train neural networks made up of thousands of languages ​​will be very difficult. Therefore, data will be extracted not only from texts, but also from videos, audio recordings and even images. The implementation of this project will take several years, and above all the new system will be used in the company’s products, including YouTube and Google Translate.

Note that this project is not the only one of its kind. Earlier this year, Meta (Facebook) announced its own project called No Language Left Behind, which aims to create a translation system that spans hundreds of languages.