MSFT Translator App

Chances are you mostly need a translator app on your

phone while you are traveling. But that’s also when you

are most likely to not have any connectivity. While most

translation apps still work when they are offline, they can’t

use the sophisticated — and computationally intense —

machine learning algorithms in the cloud that typically

power them. Until now, that was also the case for the

Microsoft Translator app on Amazon Fire, Android and

iOS, but starting today, the app will actually run a slightly

modified neural translation when offline (though iOS users

may still have to wait a few days, as the update still has

to be approved by Apple).

What’s interesting about this is that Microsoft  is able to

do this on virtually any modern phone and that there is

no need for a custom AI chip in them.

Microsoft’s Arul Menezes tells me that these new

translation packs are “dramatically better” and provide

far more human-like translation than the old ones, which

relied on an older approach to machine translations that

has now been far surpassed by machine learning-based

systems. The updated language packs (which only take

up about half the space of the old ones) are now available

for Arabic, Chinese-Simplified, French, German, Italian,

Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and

Thai, with others to follow.