The Dhivehi language translation feature included in Microsoft translator and Microsoft 365 lets you press a button and translate written Dhivehi into English. Though there are a few hiccups here and there, the service is great and provides an understanding of the overall document. This is more than what we see from any existing models.
I was amazed to see a link in one of my outlook web emails,
it says “translate message to: English” which could mean nothing usually,
however, when I saw the next sentence which said “Never translate from: Divehi”,
I thought why would it says Divehi specifically if it doesn’t understand that
the entire email was written in Dhivehi? Out of curiosity, I pressed the button,
and to my surprise, it was quite good. The essence of the message was retained
very well.
For example, something like އިޙްތިރާމް ޤަބޫލުކުރެއްވުން އެދެން could be
translated as “I would like to respect you”, which is ok in terms of translation, but what it
meant was greetings to you.
Nevertheless, I feel this is great
progress. Microsoft says that translator is part of Microsoft cognitive
services, and now I am very curious to check out how we could leverage the
cognitive services to Dhivehi language-specific tasks without training a Dhivehi
language model from scratch. To me, this means a world of possibilities opening
up for us.
There are several NLP models and many
great language services, especially I salute the people at Dhivehi.ai for their
text to speed model and working on a Speech to text model, It seems the benefit
of AI has now started to touch our lives in ways we did not foresee for a language
like Dhivehi.
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