Hyundai Launches an AI-Powered Translation Engine Focused on the Car Industry

While, at first, it would sound odd for a carmaker to invest in a translation system, the South Korean company says it focused on such a technology for a very simple reason. Hyundai needed employees in its home market and those in other regions to communicate efficiently, so instead of relying on other translation solutions, it just decided to build its own.

Called H-Translator, the new app is based on artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms, and according to Hyundai, it’s first and foremost focused on content related to the automotive industry. This makes total sense given Hyundai’s main industry, but the company says it has tried to make the service align with the latest tech in this particular software category.

So, for example, H-Translator can cope with written text, but it also features OCR capabilities and thus recognizes text included in photos, extracts it, and then provides a translated version.

And because the purpose of this app is to allow easy communications between employees, H-Translator can be embedded in live chatrooms where it can translate messages in real time. In other words, one user can send messages in one language, and everybody would receive the translated version, thus making the communication overall much easier.

As far as the software market is concerned, Hyundai’s new software isn’t necessarily a breaking technology, as similar translation engines already exist on the market.

At this point, one of the most popular and advanced solutions is Google’s translation engine, which also works on mobile devices. Microsoft has also developed a live translation engine that works in video conversations, allowing two users to speak different languages but still be able to communicate just like they’d use the same one. You can see a video demonstration of Microsoft’s own implementation in the clip embedded below.