I have long been intrigued by archaeogaming--an academic discipline that explores the fusion of archaeological objects, methods, and characters into video games. So I was thrilled when the video game company Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed: Origins, set in Egypt during Cleopatra's reign. The designers collaborated with Egyptologists to ensure everything from the architecture to the hieroglyphics created an accurate, immersive world. Unexpectedly, this partnership inspired a machine-learning spinoff that changed the course of my early career. While working with Egyptologists, the game developers learned that translating and interpreting ancient hieroglyphic texts is time-consuming, and the process has changed little in the last century.

Google's Arts & Culture division has a promising new app, called Fabricius, that uses machine learning to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. The free app allows you to learn more about hieroglyphics, write them, and to decode them. Besides being a fun educational tool (and a way of sending coded love letters and hate mail), the program holds great promise for the study and instant translation of dead languages. In this video, an amateur Egyptology reviews the app and points out its strengths and its weaknesses.

Google has launched a hieroglyphics translator that uses AI to decipher images of Ancient Egyptian script. The new tool, called Fabricius, uses machine learning to give experts a fast way to decode hieroglyphics by uploading their files. But the tool is available to non-experts as a fun and interactive way to learn about and write in the ancient language. Anyone can type in messages and be provided with an instant hieroglyphic equivalent to share on social media. Users can also draw their own best attempt at an ancient hieroglyphic and see if Google's machine learning technology can identify it from its database of hieroglyphs. The tool aims to'help bring people closer to ancient Egyptian heritage and culture' and highlight the importance of the preserving hieroglyphics as a language.

Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs over four millennia ago to engrave and record their stories. Today, only a select group of people know how to read or interpret those inscriptions. To read and decipher the ancient hieroglyphic writing, researchers and scholars have been using the Rosetta Stone, an irregularly shaped black granite stone. In 2017, game developer Ubisoft launched an initiative to use AI and machine learning to understand the written language of the Pharoahs. The initiative brought researchers from Australia's Macquarie University and Google's Art and Culture division togther.

Google has launched a hieroglyphics translator that uses machine learning to decode ancient Egyptian language. The feature has been added to its Arts & Culture app. It also allows users to translate their own words and emojis into shareable hieroglyphs. Google says Fabricius is the first such tool to be trained via machine learning "to make sense of what a hieroglyph is". In theory, it should improve over time as more people use it.