How Microsoft's Translate A.I. Just Reached 'Dream' Human Levels

Microsoft revealed on Wednesday it has reached a monumental milestone in artificial intelligence-powered translation software, declaring the creation of a system that can translate news article sentences from Chinese to English just as good as a human. "Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had," Xuedong Huang, technical fellow in charge of the company's translation efforts, said in a statement. "We just didn't realize we'd be able to hit it so soon." The breakthrough is the latest in a race to develop human-like translations. Google has improved its translation tools over time, parsing whole sentences with a November 2016 update.