Microsoft announced today that its Translator app now supports offline, artificial intelligence-powered translation in a handful of languages with what the company says is "the world's first Deep Neural Network-powered offline translation engine." The AI packs are considerably smaller than traditional language packs, and they should provide higher quality translations, too.

The AI-powered language packs are available now on the Android version of the Microsoft Translator app. The iOS update is currently undergoing Apple's review process, and Windows device support is "coming soon."

The algorithms that power its AI translation have been optimized to the extent that they're able to run "directly on any modern device’s CPU" without requiring an internet connection. The AI translation packs are roughly half the size of their traditional counterparts at about 100 megabytes apiece, and provide "up to 23% higher quality translations." They're currently available in 11 languages:

  • Arabic
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Spanish
  • Thai

Android developers who want to preview Microsoft's offline translation for use in their own apps can check out the GitHub documentation. The feature should "graduate from preview to general availability" within 90 days.

Source: Microsoft (1), (2)