WhatsApp and artificial intelligence
Machine translation
Machine translation is the use of software to turn text or speech in one language into another without a human translator. Today it is mostly done by neural systems and language models, which translate fluently but can go wrong with proper names or with words that have several meanings.
Also known asMT · automatic translation · neural machine translation · traducción automática
How it is used in a residence
The first systems applied rules or statistics; today's are neural, and a large language model can simply be asked to translate. In a residence it turns up in two places. One is the assistant's reply: if it comes out in one language and the person writes in another, it has to be translated, and for that you first need to know which language they write in, which is language detection. The other is everything the staff write: announcements, a direct message from reception, the poster for the end-of-year dinner.
The delicate part is not the sentence but the data. A clumsy translation can still be understood; a changed time or a broken link cannot. That is why it makes sense to set aside, before translating, whatever must not be touched (times, figures, links, proper names) and put it back afterwards: a name that is not identified in time can end up translated as an ordinary word. And neural tools, however good, still often need a person to check the result.
Worth knowing
What people take for granted: that if the assistant translates, the resident gets everything in their language. It depends on what is translated. An announcement written in Spanish by the staff may go out as it is even though the assistant replies in English, and that is worth knowing before sending an important notice to the whole house.
Sources
Related terms
- AI assistantAn AI assistant is a program that holds a conversation in natural language and, with a language model behind it, understands what it is told even without keywords. In a residence it handles the messaging channel: it answers what is in the house rules, takes requests and passes the rest to a person.
- Language detectionLanguage detection is the task of working out automatically which language a text is written in. In a WhatsApp assistant it decides which language to reply in, and what it finds hardest is telling closely related languages apart or handling sentences that mix two languages.