Baidu challenges Google in the language translation race
The artificial intelligence of China’s largest search engine can translate English to Chinese and German in real time.
The famous Chinese Internet company Baidu has just announced an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that can translate English to Chinese and German in real time. According to CNBC, this product was created to challenge Google.
Currently, many online translation services allow users to speak or write a sentence, which is then translated, but with a certain delay. Baidu’s new tool can perform this translation almost instantly, much like a digital interpreter. This product is a breakthrough for the company, following its strong investment in AI technology over the past few years.
Baidu is the most popular search engine in China.
According to Liang Huang, head of the research team at Baidu, the company has trained its AI on two million English and Chinese sentences. This allows it to perform translations even with sentences that have very different structures.
In its blog post, Baidu used the example sentence: “President Bush met Russian President Putin in Moscow.” In Chinese, the verb “met” comes at the end of the sentence. But when translated into English, it becomes the third word to fit that language’s structure. Thanks to its Deep Learning system, the AI can predict the word in the English sentence, even before that word is spoken.
“We teach our system how to predict the English words for Chinese prefixes,” Huang said. “It learns from the data that if Bush or any US president was in Moscow, he’s probably going to meet someone.”
This approach is not used in conventional online translation methods and helps minimize latency because the system doesn’t need to evaluate the sentence structure.
Additionally, the translation tool can also be adjusted for latency. This means users can set a delay between a word being spoken and the corresponding translation. The higher the delay, the more perfect the translation will be. Huang also stated that in the near future, the tool could translate new language pairs.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a rapidly developing field because it offers the potential for machines to understand human speech. This is considered a key technology that can be integrated into smart products, such as voice assistants. Voice technology is also a major “battleground” with the involvement of Amazon, Apple, and Google.
Baidu is China’s largest search engine. This is why it is often compared to Google. The company itself continuously releases products similar to the American company’s. The latest product from the firm, appearing over a year after Google announced the Pixel Buds, is a set of wireless headphones that support live translation.
Huang mentioned that Baidu is looking to integrate the AI into a portable Wi-Fi device. Users could carry the device while traveling, which would both provide Wi-Fi and serve as a translator. The company also plans to use this technology to translate speeches at the Baidu World Conference taking place in Beijing in early November.
However, he stated that the company has no immediate plans to develop a voice assistant. This is because he admits the aforementioned product still has limitations and is not yet ready to fully replace humans, for example, at an important political event.
Bao Nam
Source: VNExpress
