Is AI about to end the need to learn foreign languages?

Anywhere you go, any language you want – you can speak it. This is what is promised by AI assistants in your pocket. Artificial intelligence already transformed how translators work. Is it about to make learning a foreign language obsolete? — Photo: Christin Klose/dpa

BERLIN: When the protagonist in the British cult sci-fi novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" sticks a creature called a Babel fish in his ear, it translates all alien speech for him. Can artificial intelligence (AI) give us something similar?

Thanks to advances in machine learning, says linguist Anatol Stefanowitsch, a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, we already have simultaneous speech translation systems that could make the arduous work of learning a foreign language obsolete.