Starting this week, the Google Translate app will be capable of visually translating 13 new languages by using the camera on your smartphone, according to a report from VentureBeat.
In 2015, Google added the visual translation feature to the Translate app with the support of 27 different languages. It allows users to translate dinner menus and signs in real time, making communicating abroad much easier. This week’s announcement adds Punjabi, Bengali, Vietnamese, Thai, Gujarati, Kannada, Nepali, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, putting the total number of supported languages close to 50.
Users can access the feature in the Translate app by navigating to the camera icon on the home screen. The app will then prompt you to line up the text you’re attempting to translate and take a photo. After that, the app will scan the text with the use of a machine learning technique known as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), which will then provide a (hopefully correct) translation into the language of your choice.
The new additions will be available on both the iOS and Android versions of the app, and they started rolling out to devices yesterday.
theverge.com
