Google on Wednesday said it wanted to develop artificial intelligence using the world's one thousand most spoken languages as tech giants compete to dominate the internet's next battleground.
Data is crucial to advances in AI, and Google and its big
tech rivals want to tap information to help make products perform better and be
more available to the widest possible audience.
"Imagine a new internet user in Africa speaking
Wolof... using their phone to ask where is the nearest pharmacy," said
Johan Schalkwyk, a researcher at Google.
Such situations "we take for granted," Schalkwyk
told reporters, adding that languages were "not available to everyone in
the world."
According to Schalkwyk, there are more than 7,000 languages
globally.
However, Google only offers its translations for a little
more than 130 of them.
The search engine giant is aiming to widen this
substantially and wants to mine data in new languages not only from texts
available on the internet, but also from videos, images and speech.
The group is also looking to collect audio clips for
languages for which there may not be much written material.
As progress is made on the project, which is estimated to
take several years, Google plans to integrate its advances into its products,
including YouTube and Google Translate.
Facebook parent Meta earlier this year announced a similar
plan called No Language Left Behind designed to create translation systems to
cover hundreds of world languages.