AppTek, a leader in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation, today announced the availability of its multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) system that performs high-quality translation of 12 Slavic languages into English. Customers can install the system on-premise or use it via a cloud-based Application Programming Interface (API).

The languages covered are Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and the languages and dialects of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Macedonian). Organizations that want to access the media and information from Slavic-speaking audiences and information sources now have a path to do so.

The 12 languages all come from the same Slavic family. They are similar in terms of vocabulary and grammar. AppTek’s highly advanced translation model uses neural network processing to exploit these similarities, enabling sophisticated cross-language translation that is contextually correct and highly accurate. This is especially important for less common, low-resource language pairs where few human-translated texts exist, such as Macedonian-to-English.

The AppTek system also easily handles linguistic “code switching,” where two languages, e.g. Ukrainian and Russian, may be mixed within a single sentence, usually a colloquial message, text or spoken. AppTek’s multilingual NMT system can also be fine-tuned to customer domains (e.g. medical texts) in one or more Slavic languages. Further, the system can be integrated with AppTek’s speech recognition solutions so that, for example, Russian speech can be recognized and translated using the same system that translates Ukrainian or Polish.

Dr. Evgeny Matusov, lead science architect for machine translation at AppTek, explained that “Because the focus of most machine translation development is on popular language pairs, other less popular languages often don’t benefit from the latest technology developments such as NMT; consequently those languages still require more expensive and hard-to-find human translation. At AppTek, we solve this problem by creating a single multilingual NMT system that is able to deliver high-quality translation of both high- and low-resource languages.”

About AppTek

AppTek lets enterprises capture and use the full value of their spoken, written and image-based content in applications relied on for daily use. Our proven artificial intelligence and machine learning-based automatic speech recognition and machine translation platform is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to translate, aggregate and analyze relevant data from a breadth of spoken and written sources―including those often overlooked due to silo’d organizational practices. Leveraging over 30 years’ worth of training data gathered from many real-world use cases – arguably the world’s largest repository and growing – AppTek enables the highest quality automatic speech recognition and machine translation solutions available anywhere for enterprises everywhere. The streaming real time combination allows for live close captioning and speech to speech translation as in the AppTek closed captioning appliance available to TV stations and the Talk2me® app available on the AppStore.

For more information, please visit http://www.apptek.com/technology/.