Google Translate is now 20 years old, believe it or not. The service was launched in 2006 as a humble experiment, and today supports “about 250 languages” and over 60,000 possible language pairs, supporting 95% of the world’s population. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most commonly used language pair is English to Spanish. The most commonly translated phrase is “thank you.”
More than 1 billion people use Google Translate each month, and more than 1 trillion words are translated each month by the service. To celebrate its 20th birthday, Google is launching one of its most requested features: pronunciation practice.
You can see it demoed in the video above. It’s now available in the Google Translate app on Android for English, Spanish, and Hindi in the US and India. It uses AI to analyze your speech and give you instant feedback on what needs to be changed so you can pronounce correctly.
Google says it’s using AI to catch “tricky idioms, local dialects and subtle references to local languages.” People who use Google Translate’s Practice feature every week are “using it for speaking practice activities, including interactive scenarios to help people build confidence to speak naturally in real-world situations”.
