Google Translate is now 20 years old, believe it or not. The service launched back in 2006 as a humble experiment, and today supports “about 250 languages”, and more than 60,000 potential language pairs, supporting 95% of the world’s population. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most used language pair is English to Spanish. The most translated phrase is “thank you”.
More than 1 billion people use Google Translate every month, and more than 1 trillion words are translated by the service each month. To celebrate its 20th birthday, Google is launching one of the most requested features: pronunciation practice.
You can see it demoed in the video above. This is now rolling out in the Google Translate app on Android, available in the US and India for English, Spanish, and Hindi. It uses AI to analyze your speech and gives you instant feedback on what needs changing so that you nail the right pronunciation.
Google says it’s been using AI to capture “tricky idioms, local slang, and the subtle context of local languages”. People who use Google Translate’s Practice feature every week “are using it for speaking practice activities, which include interactive scenarios to help people build their confidence to speak naturally in real-world situations”.