Yesterday, Google announced that the updated Google Translate app will now support 20 new languages. Google has also worked to make voice translations much faster than before, especially for slower connections.

The search giant said that the updated Google Translate app can now read 27 languages and can translate the text instantly without the requirement of an Internet connection.

The text translation in real-time began with seven languages, including Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French and English.

The new languages added to the updated Google Translate app are Ukrainian, Turkish, Swedish, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Filipino, Dutch, Danish, Czech, Croatian, Catalan and Bulgarian.

Moreover, one way translations from English to Hindi and Thai are also available now.

Product Manager for Google Translate, Julie Cattiau, said:

“Our mission is to help overcome language barriers. Whenever someone faces an obstacle due to encountering a second language, we want to be there to help solve the problem. Within that mission, our most important project is improving the quality of machine translation. But part of that is also the overall user experience, which is why we also invest in things like instant camera translation and multi-language conversation.”

To allow picture to text translation in different languages, the search giant has made use of neural nets, which is an image recognition technology. Google’s picture to text translation will require a snapshot of text and can be operated in 37 languages.

Since January 2015, Google Translate has been used by more than 500 million people per month and over one billion translations have been made per day.

The support for more languages will help a lot of people who travel a lot in countries, whose language is not known to them. The updated Google Translate app is available for both iOS and Android devices.