Google celebrates Translate 20th anniversary by launching pronunciation practice, which the company says is one of the most requested features for the product. The feature is currently only rolling out to Android in English, Spanish, and Hindi in the US and India. If it’s available to you, you’ll see a button at the bottom of the app saying “Practice,” which gives you the option to either “pronounce” what you’ve translated or “listen” to how it’s actually pronounced by native speakers.
If you choose the “pronounce” option, Translate will listen to you speak and then use artificial intelligence to analyze how you pronounced the words to provide feedback. It will then show you a phonetic spelling of how specific words should be pronounced. In the example provided by Google, for example, the speaker pronounced the Spanish word for juice as “jugo” with the English “j” sound instead of the Spanish “j” sound. So, Translate spells it as “HU-go” in its pronunciation suggestion.
Google said that about a third of mobile users use Translate to practice speaking and listening so they can hold real-life conversations, making this new feature a very useful addition. The company also revealed other statistics about the app. Apparently it now supports over 250 languages, including some endangered and indigenous languages, and has over 1 billion monthly users who translate over 1 trillion words every month.
This article was originally published on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-translate-uses-ai-to-help-you-practice-pronunciation-160000542.html?src=rss
