Research Blog: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

Check the full post for details; available for Android and iOS

"Today we announced that the Google Translate app now does real-time visual translation of 20 more languages. So the next time you’re in Prague and can’t read a menu, we’ve got your back. But how are we able to recognize these new languages?

In short: deep neural nets. When the Word Lens team joined Google, we were excited for the opportunity to work with some of the leading researchers in deep learning. Neural nets have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years because they’ve set all kinds of records in image recognition. Five years ago, if you gave a computer an image of a cat or a dog, it had trouble telling which was which. Thanks to convolutional neural networks, not only can computers tell the difference between cats and dogs, they can even recognize different breeds of dogs. Yes, they’re good for more than just trippy art—if you're translating a foreign menu or sign with the latest version of Google's Translate app, you're now using a deep neural net. And the amazing part is it can all work on your phone, without an Internet connection. Here’s how."

Research Blog: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone