Microsoft said it has partnered with Huawei to bring fully neural on-device language translations in the Microsoft Translator app for Android customized for Huawei's Mate 20 Series of smartphones. The Microsoft Translator app with these capabilities comes pre-installed on Huawei Mate 20 devices allowing Mate 20 user to have native access to online quality level translations even when they are not connected to the Internet.
Microsoft it has customized its neural machine translation technology for Huawei's NPU (Neural Processing Unit) hardware in the Kirin 980 SoC that powers the Mate 20 devices. So, now the Huawei's Mate 20 Series of smartphones will get better and faster translations compared to existing offline packs. The company said that this offers users a offline language experience not found on other devices: the power of neural network translation without an internet connection.
Microsoft informed that it uses the industry standard BLEU score to measure its translation quality. BLEU rates translation quality by comparing how close machine translations are to human ones. Using this methodology, internal tests have shown, depending on the language, up to a 23 percent better offline translation quality over competing best-in-class offline packs, and often a difference of less than 1 BLEU point between Microsoft state-of-the-art online neural and offline neural translations. This means that even when you're not connected to the Internet, offline translation quality using the Translator app on Huawei's Mate 20 is closer to human translation than offline translations have ever been.
Microsoft claimed that its tests also showed that translation of a full-page text picture was not only more accurate but also up to three times faster than with the previous versions of Microsoft Translator on other high-end devices. “This new technology also saves space: The language packs for Huawei Mate 20 are 50 percent smaller than current Translator packs, leaving more space for your travel memories,” said the company.
Huawei's users in India can download neural translation packs for Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bangla and Urdu, with more languages to come. Users can also give voice inputs in English and get translations in these Indian languages.
The app has all the features Microsoft Translator is known for, including 60+ text translation languages and the Translator live feature that allows up to 100 people to have real-time conversations from their own device, including joining a translated presentation using the Presentation Translator PowerPoint add-in, and more.
