Google is using AI to add more than 100 languages to its Google Translate function. The added languages represent one-tenth of the world's population.

In a blog post on Thursday, Google wrote that the new language support was made possible by the company's large-scale language model PaLM 2, the LLM that is found in several Google products, including Bard, which eventually became Gemini.

Google added new languages to Translate in 2022, when it added 24 languages using a separate machine learning program. At that time, the number of supported languages had increased to 133.

With the new additions, the total number of supported languages is now 243. The final language leap coincided with an announcement introducing Google's commitment to add 1,000 of the most spoken languages to Translate using AI models. more than 140 new languages in the past two years, and it appears to be on track.

According to Google, the added languages represent more than 614 million speakers.

The most prominent languages include Cantonese. Already registered in Google Translate, Cantonese is compared to Mandarin, the official language of China. Cantonese is spoken primarily in southeastern China, especially in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. For example, speaking Mandarin and Cantonese is like speaking French or Italian. There are similarities because they are root languages, but understanding them is complex.

Another heavily populated language is Punjabi, spoken primarily by Pakistanis.

I think it is cool that Google is also adding smaller, more regional languages like Manx, a Celtic language spoken on the Isle of Man that nearly became extinct in the 1970s. There is also Tok Pisin, the common language of Papua New Guinea and an English-based creole.

According to Google, some of the added languages were added by crowd request or with contributions from many volunteers, such as Afar, a tonal language spoken in Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Cantonese was another language that received many requests.

It will be interesting to see these reflected in Gemini. Live translation is a boon for travel, and the more languages the AI tool can process, the easier it will be to communicate with neighbors around the world.