Microsoft Translator gets AI-driven offline language packs on Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire

In most cases, AI-powered translation needs a device connected to the web and — at least sometimes — a powerful processor with hardware AI features. Fortunately, Microsoft Translator has just received a new set of capabilities that allows its users to enjoy the advantages that AI-driven translation provides without having to be online. Even more, thanks to its highly-optimized code, this app no longer needs dedicated AI hardware and is able to run on any modern mobile processor.

According to the official blog post about this breakthrough, "The new capabilities allow both end-users and third-party app developers to have the benefit of neural translation technology regardless of whether the device is connected to the cloud or offline."

Microsoft's internal testing revealed ​that the new AI-driven language packs produce translations that are 23 percent better than those provided by the previous non-neural offline language packs, and these new packages are also 50 percent smaller than their predecessors.

The new Translator app will soon receive support for Windows devices, but now it is ready for Android and Amazon Fire devices. The updated version of Microsoft Translator for iOS is currently being reviewed by Apple and should be available by the end of this week as well. In this moment, the app supports over 60 languages for text translation, as well as conversational speech translation for modern standard Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. For all these platforms, the version number of the updated app is 3.2.x.