OpenAI Takes on Google Translate With Its New AI-Powered Translation Feature

OpenAI has silently released a new interface on its ChatGPT website, aimed at offering text translations. The experience opens in a new webpage that has a similar layout as Google Translate. Currently, users can either type the text or paste it from a different website. While it is a useful feature, the translation part does not seem to use any artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Instead, the AI part comes after the translation, as the page allows users to refine the translated text in different styles and tonalities.

ChatGPT Translate Is Here

First spotted by X (formerly known as Twitter) user Tibor Blaho, Lead Engineer at AIRPM, the Translate with ChatGPT feature was released by OpenAI without any fanfare. There is no blog post, social media announcement, and even the company's employees have also not mentioned it anywhere. The page can be opened by clicking here, and there does not seem to be an app-compatible interface available at this time.

Translate with ChatGPT is a straightforward tool. There are two large text boxes. Users can type or paste the text they need translated on the left box, which is set at “Detect language” by default. The right box is where the translated text appears, and the user can toggle a drop down menu to select from the supported languages.

The selection of languages is quite limited with only 50 or so options available. However, major languages, such as English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and more, are supported. Several Indic languages are also available, including Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Urdu.

While the website mentions that users can either add text, upload an image, or use voice to get a translation, there is no option to add an image. Voice-based translation also only works on the mobile browser when the microphone is turned on. This could be an under-development feature.

The service directly competes with Google Translate, but falls short on several account. For instance, Google supports roughly 243 languages, a far larger selection than what OpenAI offers. The Gemini-maker's translation platform also supports images, documents, camera-feed, and real-time conversations, none of which is available on OpenAI's latest offering.