Machine learning boosts Google’s translation capabilities to near human levels
The technology behind Google's AlphaGo is about to give Google Translate a major upgrade and it's within a whisker of being as good at it as humans are.
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Griffin, M. (2016) 'Machine learning boosts Google’s translation capabilities to near human levels', 311 Institute, 29 September. Available at: https://www.311institute.com/alphago-ai-helps-take-google-translate-to-the-next-level/ (Accessed: 1 October 2026).
Last year, a computer system built by a team of Google engineers beat one of the world’s top Go players and the wins that AlphaGo racked up against Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol were so unexpected that the story turned into a media frenzy. Now the same DeepMind AI that that was behind AlphaGo is at the heart of Google's latest incarnation of its online translation service "Google Translate".
Modelled after the way neurons connect in the human brain, deep neural networks are the same breed of AI technology that identifies commands spoken into Android phones and the same technology that recognises people in photos posted to Facebook. Now the promise is that it will reinvent machine translation in much the same way.
Google says that with certain languages its new system, dubbed Google Neural Machine Translation, or GNMT - reduces errors by 60 percent and given the fact that Google's previous iteration of its translation system was 92 percent accurate reducing the number of errors by this amount is a significant improvement and takes it almost to human levels of competence.
For now this latest incarnation only translates from Chinese into English but the company plans to roll it out for the more than 10,000 language pairs now handled by Google Translate.
“We can train this whole system in an end-to-end fashion and that makes it much easier for us to focus on reducing the final error rate,” said Google engineer Mike Schuster, one of the lead members of the Google Brain team, which oversees the company’s AI work.
“What we have now is not perfect. But you can tell that it is much, much better.”
All the big internet giants, from Facebook to Microsoft, from LinkedIn to Alibaba, are moving in the same direction, training deep neural nets using translati
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The technology behind Google's AlphaGo is about to give Google Translate a major upgrade and it's within a whisker of being as good at it as humans are.
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Matthew Griffin Founder, 311 Institute
Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath."
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Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath." 15-time best selling author of the "Codex of the Future" series, Matthew is the Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm working with royal households, world leaders, G7, G20, and G77 governments, NGOs, and multi-national mid and mega cap firms to help them explore, shape, and lead the next 50 years of business and society.
An award-winning YouTube creator with over a million followers, with an unrivalled global reach and impact, Matthew is a highly sought-after international keynote speaker, lecturer, and mentor who collaborates with global leaders through the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to shape pivotal initiatives such as the UN’s AI for Humanity program, the United Nations Conference of the Parties (UN COP), and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As the former Global Head of Cloud, National Security, and Enterprise Sales for companies including Atos, Dell-EMC, and IBM, Matthew has a proven track record of building multi-billion dollar business units and turning failing divisions into market leaders. His ability to identify, analyse, and communicate the implications of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends is unparalleled, and his insights are trusted by many of the world’s most respected organisations, including ABB, Accenture, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi, Coca-Cola, Dentons, Deloitte, Dow Jones, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, Siemens AG and Siemens Energy, T-Mobile, UBS, VISA, Walmart, Workday, Worldpay and many others.
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Source: first published by the 311 Institute on 29 September 2016. Cite as: Griffin, M. (2016). Machine learning boosts Google’s translation capabilities to near human levels. 311 Institute. https://www.311institute.com/alphago-ai-helps-take-google-translate-to-the-next-level/
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