AI for everyone in every language

Google is advancing AI to move beyond text translation and better understand the emotional tone, slang, and real-life communication styles used in hundreds of languages, including those previously excluded from technology. The company collaborates with local communities worldwide to ensure tools respect cultural differences and remain functional even without reliable internet access. Today, Google’s language technologies support over 300 languages spoken by more than 7 billion people, covering 86% of the global population. This milestone highlights ongoing efforts to address the historical underrepresentation of thousands of living languages in digital tools.

Historically, speech recognition relied on transcribing audio into text before processing, which stripped away tone, emotion, and context. Google’s new approach trains models like Gemini to process audio directly, capturing nuances such as laughter, hesitation, and mixed-language speech like Spanglish or Hinglish. The company has formed grassroots partnerships to gather data for underrepresented languages, leading to ambitious open-data initiatives. These efforts aim to build systems that honor cultural context and the richness of human expression rather than forcing users to adapt to rigid technology.

To improve accessibility, Google developed TranslateGemma, a lightweight open translation model trained on 55 languages that operates efficiently on-device, eliminating the need for constant internet access. For users with feature phones, Google supports Viamo’s ‘Ask Viamo Anything’ (AVA), a voice AI assistant powered by Gemini, which has answered over 2 million questions in Rwanda. Additionally, Google is expanding Sign Language-to-Text (SL2T) technology, trained on over 50 sign languages, to enable sign-to-text dictation in tools like Gboard and Live Transcribe on Pixel 11, starting with American Sign Language.

Google emphasizes cultural accuracy in language technology, such as improving Māori place name pronunciation in Google Maps through collaboration with local experts in New Zealand. The company’s language technologies are integrated across major platforms like Search, Android, and YouTube, reaching over five billion users. The focus remains on building systems that respect cultural heritage, grasp context, and expand human expression rather than limiting it.