You may want to install Microsoft Translator if you're going to Japan and your vocabulary is limited to "Konnichiwa," "Ohayou" and " Notice me senpai." The app can now turn your spoken words into Nihongo to help you get around the country. Translator can recognize a bevy of languages, but Japanese is only the 10th language its speech translation feature supports. That's right -- it now reads the resulting Japanese words or phrases out loud to make it possible to hold almost real-time conversations with native speakers. The other nine languages in the list are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Some giant viruses encode a genome larger than that of some bacteria, but their evolutionary history is a mystery. Examining the genomes within a sample from a wastewater treatment plant in Austria, Schulz et al. assembled a previously undiscovered giant virus genome, which they used to mine genetic databases for related viruses. The authors thus identified a group of giant viruses with more genes encoding components of the protein translation machinery, including aminoacyl transfer RNA synthetases, than in other giant viruses. Phylogenetic analyses suggest that the genes were acquired in an evolutionarily recent time frame, likely from, and as an adaptation to, their hosts.

The only problem with Google's Gboard keyboard for Android is that I'm totally hooked on its best features. Read on for nine of the niftiest Gboard features, from dedicated number rows and an on-demand numeric keypad to "neural" translations and a long-press shortcut for oft-used symbols. Note: Yes, there's also a version of Gboard for iOS, but most of my favorite Gboard tricks only work on the Android version. Tapping a virtual keypad with a single thumb can be something of a stretch if your phone has a massive screen. Luckily, Gboard has a clever feature that makes it easier to tap with just one hand.

Google's latest take on machine translation could make it easier for people to communicate with those speaking a different language, by translating speech directly into text in a language they understand. Machine translation of speech normally works by first converting it into text, then translating that into text in another language. But any error in speech recognition will lead to an error in transcription and a mistake in the translation. Researchers at Google Brain, the tech giant's deep learning research arm, have turned to neural networks to cut out the middle step. By skipping transcription, the approach could potentially allow for more accurate and quicker translations.

The training sentences vary in length from a single word all the way up to very long run-on sentences. TensorFlow does not currently support variable length sequences in RNNs, so this is a problem. In order to deal with these variable length inputs and outputs, the data could be padded to be the same length as the longest input and output, but this would create a lot of pad symbols in our training data and would probably mess with the output. We could also create a model for each possible length of input and output, but that would create a very large number of modules and require a much larger amount of training data. The TensorFlow framework recommends solving this problem through bucketing.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly mentions what has become known as the "10,000-hour rule", which states that to become world-class in any field you must devote 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice". Whether or not you believe the 10,000-hour figure, many would acknowledge that to become an accomplished legal professional requires considerable legal, communicative and, particularly in in-house environments, interpersonal skills that are often acquired after a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. There has been much hoopla about AI-based legal systems that, some might have you believe, may soon replace lawyers (no doubt causing a degree of anxiety among some legal professionals). There is some misunderstanding among many lawyers, and much of the public, about what AI systems are presently capable of. Can a legal AI, based on current technology, actually "think" like a lawyer?

"The game isn't going to tell you if you got that right." It's an ominous way to start a game demo, but one I'm not too surprised by after playing 80 Days and Sorcery! Heaven's Vault is Inkle's new game, and I met up with studio co-founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey recently to get some hands-on time. At first glance it's a huge step away from Inkle's previous games--where 80 Days and Sorcery mostly played out in text, Heaven's Vault features fully navigable 3D environments. Your character Aliya Elasra is 2D though, her movements more suggested by a series of still frames than fully animated.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that has seen a profound rise in attention within the last few years. The increase in the technology's media coverage has been the result of consistent progress made in improving its capabilities. The expansion of AI's capabilities has fostered its adaptation into areas such as business, medicine, and automotive. The concept of AI was once the subject of imaginative thinking found in the realm of literature. Stories ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to 2004's David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas all address the concept of and questions surrounding AI.

Canan Dagdeviren [JAH-naan DAH-day-vee-ren] is head of the new'Conformable Decoders' research group at MIT. Scientist Canan Dagdeviren is an interpreter for a language without words. She knows they're both saying something important, speaking the unique language of the body. It's a lexicon that's completely different from the Turkish and English that Dagdeviren speaks every day – but it's one she believes we need to start translating in earnest. She wants to count up our brain pulses, watch our temperature change in real time and observe how we breathe. This is different from the health-monitoring tech inside consumer Fitbits and smart watches that can count each step and monitor every heartbeat.

I recently visited China on a business trip. While there, I decided I wanted to get a pedicure. My search turned into quite the adventure -- one that involved cutting edge translation technology, and a key word lost in translation. Google and Baidu (which is often referred to as China's Google) have built voice translation apps, available here and here. You speak into them, they listen and then they translate into the language you choose.