Google Cloud speech-to-text reaches 200 million more people with language upgrades

Google Cloud is extending its Speech-to-Text API to an additional 200 million people around the world today by adding support for Albanian, Burmese, Estonian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Punjabi, and Uzbek. Language upgrades added today means the API now supports more than 70 languages.

Speech-to-Text is a form of natural language processing (NLP) that converts speech into words and is often applied to things like video subtitles or transcription. Also new: As part of news today, a version of the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API that clocks 60% better performance than the base model at transcribing telephone audio is now available in U.S. Spanish, U.K. English, and Russian.

The API is also getting an improved ability to attribute words to specific speakers in transcripts and automatically punctuate languages like German, French, Japanese, and Swedish.

This is the latest expansion of Google’s language offerings.

Last week Google Translate added support for new languages like Uighur and Turkmen, and on Wednesday, Google made reading and translation of longform content with a more expressive voice available through Google Assistant. Google Assistant speaks twice as many languages today as Amazon’s Alexa, and more than any other AI assistant on the market.

In other recent Google Cloud news, due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, the Next conference was converted into an online-only event.

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