Baidu to debut simultaneous machine translation in latest challenge to Google

  • Baidu system claims to be first with ‘anticipation capabilities and controllable latency’
  • The AI model is trained with data including similar sentence structures

Sarah Daiin Beijing
A woman touches a screen on a robot developed by iFlyTek at the outpatient hall of People's Liberation Army General Hospital in Beijing. Natural language processing has been considered one of the holy grails in AI. Photo: Reuterss

Baidu, operator of China’s largest search engine and a national champion in artificial intelligence, has thrown down the gauntlet to Google with the upcoming debut of its first simultaneous translation system.

The public demonstration, scheduled for the company’s annual Baidu World tech showcase on November 1, will come a year after its US-based rival released earbuds that claim to be able to translate 40 languages in close to real time.

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