Translation and Language Industry Observations

Convertibles have been around for years. I myself never owned one, but I did rent one on a business trip to San Diego in 2016. And man was it fun! There was one hitch though: when I put the top down, my new suit got stuck in the retractable thing and nearly got ripped up. Luckily though nothing happened to my suit.

We have all heard of self-driving cars. Futurists are predicting that in the near future, we will be able to sleep while our cars take us about our business. Traffic jams will become enjoyable, since people will be able to read, work, eat and drink while they move (slowly) enroute to their destination.

Will the car of the future be conversable as well. Will we be able to converse with our car, like one would to a chauffer? Like telling your car “we’re stopping by to pick up the Bentley’s on 55 Park Avenue.” Or the car saying “will you be needing anything else today sir?” Or maybe the conversable car will have a robotic arm and can do pickups and deliveries? And if anything comes up, the car can call you and get further instructions.

But it appears that the trend will go much further. Cars will be able to talk with each other, with traffic lights and with signals. By doing so, road congestion and road accidents will decrease.

It looks like the automobile companies are heading in this direction. Last week, Hyundai and Kia announced the hiring of Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert Professor Kyunghyun Cho.

… Cho is considered to have revolutionized AI translation services by developing a neural machine translation (NMT) algorithm that enables high-quality translation by understanding the overall context of the translated sentence, as well as to have shown achievements in the research of multimodal AI systems, a system that can learn different types of combined data such as text and images.

Professor Cho has published many papers in the field of machine translation. You can check it out here. By hiring an AI machine translation expert, Hyundai and Kia seem to be intent on making talking cars a reality. The concept is not a new one, and is part of a larger trend called the The Internet of Things (IoT). Since the automotive industry is so competitive, we can expect other car companies to follow suit and hire their own machine learning and machine translation experts.

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