Technology Magazine December 2019 | Page 42

MACHINE TRANSLATION
AI
42

T he field of speech technologies is a complex and storied one , deriving from computational linguistics and other academic circles . The latest generation of the technology is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to open up new possibilities in the space . Companies like jobpal are just the latest in a raft of organisations deriving success from a technological approach to language problems . While jobpal is disrupting the recruitment process with chatbots and “ conversational intelligence ”, myriad other applications are becoming apparent , which we can broadly cluster in categories of machine translation , automatic speech recognition ( ASR ) and speech synthesis .

MACHINE TRANSLATION
In a world connecting to the internet at pace , there ’ s an attendant focus on catering to customers in their own languages . It ’ s here that the field of machine translation has witnessed a new flurry of activity . Southeast Asia as a region is both a technological boomtown and a hub of language diversity . Regional ride-hailing unicorn Grab recently announced it was investing a further $ 150m , on top of a prior $ 100mn , in AI endeavours including natural language processing ( NLP ) to
DECEMBER 2019