Naver has announced that it has officially brought its translation app Papago out of beta and has also released a web version of the service.
Launched last year, Papago’s beta version has taken off over the past 11 months and has become the go-to translation app for most Koreans. The service, which uses Naver’s neural machine translation to provide better results, has gone up against the likes of Google Translate’s new algorithm which also uses deep learning. While it’s debatable which platform is “better”, Naver seems to have a good foothold on the market following an aggressive and eye-catching advertising campaign.
In addition to English and Korean, the app supports Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and French so far. Naver has also been establishing multiple business partnerships with department stores, convenience stores and the police to help provide more specialized everyday translation services.
One of the most important changes to the latest version of Papago is the increased character limit of 5000, which is the same as Google Translate. The app was previously designed for short everyday phrases and only came with a 200 character limit, but with the new update the app can be used to translate text from news articles and emails more easily.
A new browser version of the app has also been launched following popular demand, though Naver seems to be doubling up with its existing translation site at translate.naver.com. It appears that Naver is pushing the Papago brand and wants to make sure it’s ready when people search for an online version of the app. Extra features for PC users are also planned, though what these will be remains unclear.
Aside from this, there have also been some improvements to the UI, and the ability to input phonetic characters.
“We are currently preparing translation services for Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Thai for later this year,” says Papago Leader, Kim Jun-seok. “With the launch of our official service, we will continue to improve our neural machine translation technology in order to provide more accurate translations for users.”
