If there's one space where the power of AI can really show its stuff, its translations. Enabling conversations between two parties speaking completely different languages is notoriously difficult, and while Google has made some strides in this space, it's certainly not finished improving its service. At today's AI-focused event in Paris, the company announced some improved contextual tools coming to Google Translate that could help speakers avoid all sorts of common mistakes in the future.

Contextual translation looks to be a major leap forward for accuracy, especially if you're trying to learn a language for the first time. As shown on stage at Google's event (which is, unfortunately, now marked as private on YouTube), Translate will start showing different variations of words with different meanings, allowing you to pick the option that best fits what you're trying to say.

In the example provided, "novel" can essentially mean three different things in English: a piece of fiction, something new, or something unique. In French, all three of those definitions are different words — novel, nouveau, and original, respectively — so, lacking context, it's easy to see how the app could botch a sentence. In fact, if you ever tried to use Translate to complete your language homework in high school, you know poorly this sort of thing can turn out.

With this contextual upgrade, Google will provide multiple meanings for each word when translating English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German. The goal isn't just accuracy — it's also to ensure that your sentence sounds and flows correctly to native speakers. Whether you're writing an email to a colleague halfway around the globe or communicating with them directly in person, it's an essential step to making bilingual conversations an effortless task.

Translate has seen its fair share of love lately, with a full Material You redesign on Android and, more recently, offline support for 33 additional languages. This particular contextual update is set to rollout sometime in the coming weeks, but Google says it'll add more language support past these initial five languages later this year.