Google uses neural networks to translate without transcribing

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. The team trained its system on hundreds of hours of Spanish audio with corresponding English text. After a learning period, Google's system produced a better-quality English translation of Spanish speech than one that transcribed the speech into written Spanish first. And text translation service Google Translate already uses neural networks on its most popular language pairs, which lets it analyse entire sentences at once to figure out the best written translation.