Any students using Google Translate to cheat on their Spanish homework can rejoice. The foreign-language translation tool is about to get a whole lot more accurate.
Last week, Google launched an updated translation tool that utilizes sophisticated artificial intelligence to produce startlingly accurate language translations.
While the tool has been used to successfully translate between English and Spanish, French and Chinese in a research setting, it's only available currently to everyday users for Chinese to English translations. The new system, which uses deep machine learning to mimic the functioning of a human brain, is called the Google Neural Machine Translation system, or GNMT.
To test the system, Google had human raters evaluate translations on a scale from 0 to 6. Translating from English to Spanish, the new Google tool's translation was rated an average of 5.43; human translators earned an average of 5.5.
For Chinese to English, the only public-facing option that currently utilizes the new system, Google Translate was rated an average of 4.3 while human translators got 4.6.