Google provides many key services that we use every day. The European Union is trying to combat the dominance of the internet giant, which introduced the Digital Market Act and the Digital Service Act at the beginning of May. In order to combat the increasing monopolization of some services, the EU forced, among other things, the removal of a link that took us to Google Maps when we clicked on a tile with the location of the searched place in the search engine. The change caused quite a storm, as most of the previous ones did. Google has just announced another one, which may not be to the liking of some users.
Google Maps is losing a somewhat forgotten feature. It’s all about favorite places
From the beta version of Google Maps, we managed to read that in 2025, the function of following favorite places will disappear – This means that we will not be able to follow selected places in the application. The option was first presented in 2018. Google described it as a simple way to access news, events, offers and other news from places and businesses of our choice. All things were to be displayed on the “For You” board, to follow selected entities, all you had to do was click the “plus” button next to them.
As the app evolved, the feature was replaced by “favorites,” so developers buried it deeper and deeper. It is not even known exactly when the “plus” button was removed. Google did not respond to journalists’ questions on the matter.
Google Adds Over 100 New Languages to Translate With Help from AI
The second important change worth mentioning is that the company has added 110 new languages, which is the largest expansion in the history of the application. Among them are Cantonese and Q’echi’, and in total, all the added languages are spoken by 614 million people in the world, about 8 percent of the population of the entire globe. About 25 percent of all added are African languages, such as Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Sa, Swati, Venda or Wolof, and next to them is Silesian. It is worth mentioning here that at the end of May we wrote that Andrzej Duda vetoed the act on the Silesian language.
– Google translation is based on a different mechanism than Translatōr Sillinga [tłumacz języka śląskiego – red.]created by Grzegorz Kulik. Google, by “improvising” as it were, generates many more grammatical errors and incomprehensible lexical choices – assesses Bartłumjej Wanot. In addition, Google translates first into English and then again into the target language. All this means that its translations are often incorrect. In the case of funny language, it often comes out funny – experts say.
This was all helped by the large language model (commonly called artificial intelligence) PaLM 2. Google claims that its use was crucial. This model helps Translate learn closely related languages. Google announces that it will support even more languages over time, in 2022 they created the 1000 Languages Initiative for this purpose.
Source: Gazeta
Mabel is a talented author and journalist with a passion for all things technology. As an experienced writer for the 247 News Agency, she has established a reputation for her in-depth reporting and expert analysis on the latest developments in the tech industry.
