Get the word out: AutoML Translation goes GA, plus updates to Translation API

Translation is a critical function for many industries, whether it’s a media organization delivering the news or a software company making sure its documentation is understood in many different languages. As a result, many businesses are using machine learning to help them translate faster and more efficiently than ever. Today, we’re excited to announce updates to our Cloud AI translation services, including the general availability of AutoML Translation and Advanced features on Translation API.

How customers are using AutoML Translation 
Since announcing AutoML Translation in beta at Next 2018, we have seen customers use the technology to build domain specific translation into their workflows. One such example is Bloomberg, who is using it to provide their analysts with a competitive edge in a fast moving industry. “It’s extremely important for our customers to access information from wherever they are,” says Ted Merz, Global Head of News Product at Bloomberg LP. “We decided we wanted to add the ability for people across the world to see news translated into the language that was most useful to them. Google's AutoML Translation helped us improve the fluency of translation for financial jargon and terms, ensuring that the stories on Bloomberg's First Word service could be delivered in real time." 

Updates to our Translation API
Alongside the general availability of AutoML Translation, we’re also expanding the ways customers can use our Translation API, by introducing Advanced and Basic editions of the API. By offering two versions, we’re giving customers the flexibility to choose the functionality that best serves the needs of their business.

The first edition, Translation API Advanced, includes our latest feature updates to Translation API. We will continue to build in advanced features to this API, such as Glossary (see image below) and model selection which were launched this year. This edition of the API is an iteration of our Translation API v3 that launched at Google Cloud Next and is now generally available.

Translation API Advanced will only support Service Accounts for authentication, so that customer managed resources can be protected with secure authentication. For a more detailed walk through of developing with Translation API Advanced, check out this blog post.

One customer that has been evaluating translation APIs is AllTrails, who helps people explore the outdoors with the largest collection of detailed, hand-curated trail maps as well as trail reviews and photos crowdsourced from a community of over 10 million users. Now that the Translation API Advanced is generally available, they’re excited to put it into production in their organization. Says James Graham, Head of Engineering at AllTrails, "Landmark and hiking trail names can have many possible translations that could be correct in different contexts, and having inaccurate translations can result in a bad day on the trail. We are looking forward to using the Glossary feature on Translation API Advanced to enable us to control the names of places in the translation results provided by Google's great machine translations.”

The second edition, Translation API Basic, is designed for customers integrating Translation services into chat applications, social media and gaming, and makes our API as easy to use as possible. Translation API Basic, the new name for Translation API v2, includes support for API keys, and the simplicity and quality the API is known for, and we’ll continue to deliver quality improvements to Translation API to support our customers.

With this announcement, Translation API Advanced joins Translation API Basic as a GA service. 

You can learn more about our Cloud Translation services on our website. For a more technical review of the two editions of the Translation API, view the documentation.