Google has announced significant language updates to Google Translate and Google Meet, enhancing their accessibility and usability for a broader global audience. These updates reflect Google’s efforts towards inclusivity, fostering better communication and collaboration across diverse languages and regions.

Google Translate

According to a company blog post, Google Translate will now feature 110 new languages, including Cantonese and Punjabi. About 25% of the added languages are African, including Swati, Venda, and Wolof. In total, the new languages expand accessibility to around 8% of the world’s population.

This expansion was enabled by the company’s PaLM 2 large language model (LLM). “PaLM 2 was a key piece to the puzzle, helping Translate more efficiently learn languages that are closely related to each other,” writes Senior Software Engineer Isaac Caswell in the blog post. “As technology advances, and as we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, we’ll support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time.”

Google Meet

The video conferencing platform now supports 11 more languages for closed captions, making communication across language barriers easier. The new languages, currently in beta, include Azerbaijani, Czech, Greek, and Icelandic. This expansion allows users, whether they are Google Workspace customers or individuals with personal Google accounts, to benefit from improved accessibility features, facilitating clearer communication during meetings.

For Gemini for Google Workspace customers, the update introduces 52 new languages to the translated captions feature, which can translate to and from any fully supported language. This brings the total number of supported languages for translated captions to 69, enabling over 4,600 language pairs. The newly supported languages include Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, and Burmese.

In addition to these new languages, Google has also rolled out full language support to six previously supported languages: Dutch, Indonesian, Japanese, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. This expansion significantly enhances the platform’s capability to facilitate multilingual meetings and collaborations.

Starting January 22, 2025, translated captions in Google Meet will be exclusively available to Gemini for Google Workspace customers. These features will be included in the Gemini Enterprise, AI Meetings and Messaging, and Gemini Education premium add-ons.