- Google Translate is now using generative AI to learn new languages.
- The app has now gained 110 new languages, including Cantonese and Portuguese (Portugal).
- Google aims to reach 1,000 supported languages in the near future.
Google Translate already supports dozens of languages but the list still doesn’t include thousands of lesser-known ones. That’s finally changing as Google has started using generative AI to learn these relatively obscure languages. And today, the company has announced support for 110 new languages.
The list of new languages include some familiar names like Cantonese, which the company says has “long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate.” Primarily spoken in parts of South China, Cantonese shares the same writing system as Mandarin. In the past, this overlap made it difficult for Google to gather enough unique data to teach its machine learning models the differences between these two languages. Generative AI finally helped bridge that gap.