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Improved Office translation for Hindi, Bengali/Bangla and Tamil

Microsoft has announced better Hindi, Bengali (Bangla) and Tamil online translation using AI enhancements in Microsoft Office, Bing and other online services.

The company has dropped their latest buzzwords like “artificial intelligence” and “deep neural networks” but what does it really mean for Microsoft’s customers?

Our headline translated into Hindi, Bangla and Tamil, according to Bing Translate.

Tamil language support is relatively new, it was added in late 2017.

Microsoft’s online translation works in:

  • Microsoft Office products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook with an Office 365 plan
  • Microsoft Translator app in Android and iOS recognizes and translates from text, speech and photos
  • Skype
  • Microsoft Edge browser
  • Bing search
  • Bing Translator website

According to Microsoft, modern neural networks can handle more subtle concepts like gender (feminine, masculine, neutral), politeness level (slang, casual, written, formal), and type of word (verb, noun, adjective).

Six Indian languages are part of top 20 global languages by population. Ironically, these languages are not on top of the digital content list. There’s not enough material on internet that we could use to train the system,” explained Krishna Doss Mohan, senior program manager, Microsoft India.

Despite the problems, Microsoft India is claiming a 20% improvement in Hindi, Bengali and Tamil translations using the new system.

You don’t need to do anything to get these new features.  They’ll start working in the Microsoft products automatically.

Microsoft supports around 60 languages, including two Klingon dialects which let Redmond pad their numbers.

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