San Jose officials said during an online event Wednesday that natural language processing technology has been a “wildly successful” tool over the past two years as they’ve attempted to provide services and information in more than 100 languages spoken by the populace.
San Jose is one of the U.S.’s most diverse cities, where 57% of residents speak a language other than English in their home. The city invested in a text- and voice-recognition translation model designed by Google Cloud and SpringML, a data analytics company, to resolve previous issues it had with helping residents access services in their preferred languages. But San Jose’s journey to auto-translation across its digital services is a winding one.
