In November last year, Google and Microsoft announced they have updated their translation engines with Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems.
Both companies celebrated a significant boost in the quality of translation output, with Google going as far as to claim that the improvement outweighs all the efforts made in the last ten years combined.
Microsoft, in turn, set up a demo page showing the dramatic progress in accuracy and fluency the NMT technology offers compared to the previous one, SMT (Statistical Machine Translation).
Though both Google and Microsoft currently support only a dozen of the most popular languages, the companies made it clear a major milestone has been reached and they’re looking to work on developing the technology and adding more languages.
Artificial neural networks have come to stay and are already proving efficient for data-intensive industries.