Want to Know What Video in Foreign Language Is Talking About? Ask Yandex

Russian tech giant Yandex announced its innovative service of machine translation of video clips from one language to another. With help of the service, users can watch videos just in a browser with voiceover translation, according to RBK news agency. 

The new service combines the current service Yandex.Translate, biometry and speech recognition, and speech synthesizer. It is supposed that the service will be able to operate with various languages. However, now the prototype can work with video clips only in English.

The service can distinguish the sex of a human being on a video and then pick up the right voice. A specially designed algorithm can track the tempo of speech to make voiceover translation match the picture on a video. 

The company is still working on the new service. Very soon, users will be able to choose video clips they want to be translated, according to Yandex.

«There are loads of useful information on the internet but for many, this content isn’t available due to the language barrier. And now we are close to getting these boundaries completely gone. We are just at the beginning of this process but we already have a prototype and know where we have to go further,» said David Talbot, the head of Yandex.Translate. 

For the first time, Yandex started to work with artificial intelligence in translation in 2017. The system has been working based on a hybrid system that includes a static model, which is a core element of the initial Yandex.Translate and a neural network. As the company noted, the AI analyzes a text as a whole rather than splitting it into separate words. As a result, the machine translation provides a more correct meaning of the entire text.