Google's New Translator Works Almost as Well as Humans

A jump in the fluency of Google's language software will help efforts to make chatbots less lame. Google's latest advance in machine learning could make the world a little smaller. The company is reëngineering its translation service after Google researchers invented a system that is significantly more accurate. In a competition that pitted the new software against human translators, it came close to matching the fluency of humans for some languages, such as when translating from English to Spanish. Google has already begun rolling out the new system for translations from Chinese to English (see examples showing the improvement).