Google revealed on Thursday that powerful artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms were used to improve its Translate platform, adding 110 new languages for users.

The IT giant’s deployment of the PaLM 2 large language model (LLM) has enabled the largest expansion that Google Translate has ever experienced.

According to a press release, Isaac Caswell, senior software engineer at Google Translate, “from Cantonese to Q’eqchi’, these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population.”

“Some are major world languages with over 100 million speakers,” Caswell said. “Others are spoken by small communities of Indigenous people, and a few have almost no native speakers but active revitalization efforts. About a quarter of the new languages come from Africa, representing our largest expansion of African languages to date, including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda and Wolof.”

Google Translate’s announcement highlighted several noteworthy additions, one of which being Cantonese. Caswell stated that Cantonese has “long been one of the most requested languages” for the tool, but adding it was difficult because it frequently overlaps with Mandarin in writing, making it “tricky to find data and train models.”

Afar, a tonal language spoken in Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, and Shahmukhi, a variant of Punjabi that is the most spoken language in Pakistan, were also added. The release mentioned that Afar had the greatest volunteer community contributions.

The Isle of Man’s Celtic language, Manx, was also included when its final native speaker passed away in 1974, almost bringing the language to extinction. Thousands of speakers now exist on the island as a consequence of a revival campaign.

Caswell pointed out that since Tok Pisin is an English-based creole, app users who speak English should try translating into it since they “might be able to make out the meaning!” Tok Pisin is the primary language of Papua New Guinea. It was added to Google Translate.

In an effort to fulfill its previously stated 1,000 Languages Initiative, which commits the business to developing AI models supporting the 1,000 most widely spoken languages in the world, Google said it intends to gradually add more languages to Translate. According to the business, that process will accelerate even further when AI technologies like PaLM 2 develop.

“PaLM 2 was a key piece to the puzzle, helping Translate more efficiently learn languages that are closely related to each other, including languages close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Mardwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole,” Caswell stated.

“As technology advances, and as we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, we’ll support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time,” he said.

Microsoft had announced plans to release Keystone, a specialized Xbox cloud console, a few years back. The device, a little white box intended for Xbox game access via the company’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service, resembled a scaled-down version of the Xbox Series S. Though Microsoft ultimately abandoned their plans to release Keystone, we can get the greatest idea of what the Xbox cloud console may have looked like thanks to a recent patent.

The patent, which was discovered by Windows Central, shows that Keystone would have come with an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a power connector. There was a USB-A port, an Xbox button, and a button for connecting controllers on the front. The system rested on a circular “Hello from Seattle” plate made by Microsoft, which is also the same plate used by the larger Xbox Series X.

Microsoft principle designer Chris Kujawski is the named inventor of the 2022 patent. Leading the Xbox Series S / X console design was Kujawski.

Microsoft subsequently discontinued the Keystone device because it was unable to bring the price down to approximately $100, despite having once stated that it planned to release an Xbox streaming device in 2021. Keystone was first seen by Xbox CEO Phil Spencer in 2022 on his desk shelf. According to the official Xbox account on X, Keystone was a “old prototype.”

In a late 2022 interview, Spencer stated, “It was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside,”  “We decided to focus that team’s effort on delivering the smart TV streaming app.”

Instead, Microsoft released an Xbox TV app. The Xbox TV app is compatible with Samsung TVs and monitors made after 2022 and up. It allows you to run games from Xbox Cloud Gaming and stream 1080p content at 60 frames per second.

Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, unveiled Claude 3.5 Sonnet, their most potent AI model to date, on Thursday.

Claude is one of the chatbots that has become quite popular in the last year, along with Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google, Salesforce, and Amazon are among the supporters of Anthropic, which was created by former OpenAI research executives. It has closed five financing arrangements worth a combined $7.3 billion in the last year.

The announcement comes after OpenAI’s GPT-4o in May and Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of models, which debuted in March. Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the first model in Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 family, is faster than the business’s previous top model, Claude 3 Opus, according to the company.

The company’s Claude.ai website and the Claude iPhone app offer Claude 3.5 Sonnet for free. Higher rate limit models are available to subscribers of Claude Pro and Team.

In addition to creating excellent content in a conversational, natural tone, the system “shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions,” according to a blog post from the business. Code can be written, edited, and run by it as well.

Anthropic also unveiled “Artifacts,” a feature that enables users to instruct its chatbot, Claude, to execute tasks like creating code or text documents, and then view the outcome in a separate window. Code development, business report authoring, and other tasks are anticipated to benefit from Artifacts, according to the company. “This creates a dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time,” the statement continued.

As generative AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI gain traction, they are competing with tech behemoths like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta in an arms race to incorporate AI technology and stay ahead of a market that is expected to generate $1 trillion in revenue over the course of the next ten years.

Anthropic debuted its first-ever enterprise product in May, and news of its new model followed.

Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC last month that the plan for businesses, called Team, had been in development for the past few quarters and involved beta-testing with between 30 and 50 customers in industries like technology, financial services, legal services, and health care. According to Amodei, many of those same customers requested a specific corporate solution, which served as inspiration for the service’s concept.

At the time, Amodei remarked, “So much of what we were hearing from enterprise businesses was that people are kind of using Claude at the office already.”

Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, joined Anthropic as chief product officer last month, not long after the business unveiled its new product. According to a release, Krieger, the former chief technological officer of Meta-owned Instagram, expanded the platform’s user base to 1 billion and boosted the number of engineers on staff to over 450. Jan Leike, a previous leader in safety at OpenAI, also joined the business in May.