A few months after it added support for a slew of Indian languages from across the nation, Microsoft Translator has now added support for Assamese, increasing the number of supported Indian languages to twelve. Powered by Azure Cognitive Service Speech, the cloud-based service will now provide real-time translation and transliteration support for the north-eastern language alongside 11 other Indian languages, including Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
Support for Assamese is now live on the Microsoft Translator website, as well on the Microsoft Translator apps on Android, iOS and Windows. Alongside Translator, Microsoft is also adding support for the language on Bing Translator and Office 365. The company said that it hopes the continued addition of new languages to its apps and services will democratize the access of information to more people in India and around the world.
“Breaking language barriers is a key step in enabling inclusion of more people and organizations to utilize technology to achieve more … It can help general users interpret real-time conversations, menus and street signs, websites, and documents. Companies can leverage it to globalize their business and strengthen customer outreach”, the company said in a press release.
Taking a deep dive into the inner workings of its translation technology, Microsoft said that it uses Deep Neural Networks to develop language models for translating and transliterating complex Indian languages. Over the years, the technology has been developed to the point that it can now can even manage minute language nuances like gender (feminine, masculine, neutral), politeness level (slang, casual, written, formal), and type of words (verb, noun, adjective), the company said.
