---
title: "Google Can Translate 27 Languages Almost Instantly, Thanks to Neural Networks"
description: "Google Translate is a very futuristic app: you can point it at signs or other text and it translates it on the fly. It's not quite a universal translator, but it's close. Now it supports 27 languages."
date: "2015-07-29"
modified: "2015-08-13"
authors:
  - name: "Kif Leswing"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/kif_leswing"
url: "https://futurism.com/google-does-real-time-translation-in-27-languages-thanks-to-neural-networks"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
  - "Google"
tags:
  - "artificial intelligence"
---

# Google Can Translate 27 Languages Almost Instantly, Thanks to Neural Networks

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/image00.png>)

- Google's using deep neural nets to power this software. "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," Google software engineer Otavio Good [wrote](<http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-google-translate-squeezes-deep.html>).
- When a camera image is taken, Google Translate first looks for letters in the picture. (Again, using a neural network.) But the real challenge is running neural networks on a phone, instead of supercomputers in data centers. Google's team optimized its software for mobile SIMD processors.
- Google Translate offers real-time two-way translation for English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

[![hindi\_indonesian\_ukrainian\_portuguese](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/hindi_indonesian_ukrainian_portuguese.gif>)](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/hindi_indonesian_ukrainian_portuguese.gif>)