Google adds THESE eight Indian languages including Sanskrit to Google Translate, says ‘it was the most requested language’

Apart from improving Google Assistant’s ability to communicate with users in a more natural way and making Google Assistant more compatible with dialects, Google announced that it has made several improvements to its Google Translate service. At their ongoing Google I/O developer’s conference, Google Translate has now ‘learnt’ 24 new languages including 8 Indian languages.

The Cupertino-based tech giant highlighted that the newly added languages are used by over 300 million people globally. For instance, the company said that Mizo is spoken by around 800,000 people in the far northeast of India, and Lingala is spoken by over 45 million people across Central Africa.

The update also brings Indigenous languages of the Americas (Quechua, Guarani and Aymara) and an English dialect (Sierra Leonean Krio) to Translate for the very first time.

Here’s The Full list of 24 new languages added to Google Translate:

• Assamese, used by about 25 million people in Northeast India
• Aymara, used by about two million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru
• Bambara, used by about 14 million people in Mali
• Bhojpuri, used by about 50 million people in northern India, Nepal and Fiji
• Dhivehi, used by about 300,000 people in the Maldives
• Dogri, used by about three million people in northern India
• Ewe, used by about seven million people in Ghana and Togo
• Guarani, used by about seven million people in Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil
• Ilocano, used by about 10 million people in northern Philippines
• Konkani, used by about two million people in Central India
• Krio, used by about four million people in Sierra Leone
• Kurdish (Sorani), used by about eight million people, mostly in Iraq
• Lingala, used by about 45 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Angola and the Republic of South Sudan
• Luganda, used by about 20 million people in Uganda and Rwanda
• Maithili, used by about 34 million people in northern India
• Meiteilon (Manipuri), used by about two million people in Northeast India
• Mizo, used by about 830,000 people in Northeast India
• Oromo, used by about 37 million people in Ethiopia and Kenya
• Quechua, used by about 10 million people in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and surrounding countries
• Sanskrit, used by about 20,000 people in India
• Sepedi, used by about 14 million people in South Africa
• Tigrinya, used by about eight million people in Eritrea and Ethiopia
• Tsonga, used by about seven million people in Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe
• Twi, used by about 11 million people in Ghana

These new languages, Google said, have been added using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where a machine learning model only sees monolingual text. The Zero-Shot Machine Translation basically learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example. “While this technology is impressive, it isn’t perfect,” Google said in an official blogpost.