Microsoft Translator adds five more Indian languages

Technology giant Microsoft India has added five new languages — Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam and Punjabi —  to Microsoft Translator, taking the total number of Indian languages on the platform to ten. 

The translator, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and deep neural networks (DNN), already supports Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. 

Language translation is a core part of its products and services, the Redmond, Washington-based company said in a statement.

The Microsoft Translator app can recognise and translate languages from text, speech and even photos. It is also rolling out support for these languages in the Microsoft Office 365 and the Swiftkey keyboard.

“With this release, we are bringing in cutting edge machine learning technology to democratise access to information for everyone in India,” Sundar Srinivasan, GM, research and development, Microsoft India, said. 

Read: Tech giant Microsoft to pledge $20 million for Covid-19 research

Additionally, Microsoft will provide application programming interfaces (APIs) on Azure for organisations of all sizes, to help them conduct their business across the country and globally in different languages, the statement added. 

Started in 1990, Microsoft India has over 11,000 employees, engaged in sales and marketing, research, development and customer services and support, across 11 Indian cities including Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai. 

Earlier this month, Microsoft rebranded its office suite, Office 365, as Microsoft 365. The latest version, which will be rolled out by April 21, continues to be a subscription service that offers tools such as Excel, Outlook, and Word.