Alpha2

Alpha2 is a service that leverages the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence to provide machine translation and text-to-speech in more than 1,000 languages. Alpha2 builds upon SIL's Serval and other tools, extending their capabilities to work with materials related to education, development, trauma healing, anti-trafficking, and more.

The last several years have seen tremendous advances in machine translation capabilities for majority languages, but the same level of progress has not yet been seen for smaller language communities. This has largely been due to lower levels of data availability and less economic demand for translation to and from languages with fewer speakers. With Alpha2, we are able to make use of SIL’s extensive multilingual parallel data to fine-tune machine translation models that achieve better results in minority languages, helping bridge the gap these traditionally underserved language communities face.

Using Alpha2​

Alpha2 is now available through the website and also via API by request.

Users can select from currently available models in more than 200 languages, with fine-tuned models for more than 1,200 languages in total available upon request. While some models are only available for non-commercial uses due to their licensing terms, the majority of languages covered by Alpha2 do have at least one model available which is licensed for commercial use. New models can also be fine-tuned on user-provided data.

As a professional service, Alpha2 aims to make the translation process easy and painless. We have expanded the range of upload and download options accepted by Alpha2, and now support SFM, Word documents (docx), and Powerpoint presentations (pptx) file types, in addition to text files, and an option for pasting in text directly. You can also run text-to-speech on the translated text, or directly on uploaded text without translation.

Reviewing results​

Results from Alpha2 still require human review. As an optional feature, this review, along with rating of translations from different models, can be completed directly within the Alpha2 UI in order to provide feedback which can be incorporated into model improvements.

Pricing​

We aim to provide affordable and competitive pricing for Alpha2 services, with most models starting at US 0.2 cents per word for the first 1 million words and US 0.1 cents per word after that. Custom fine-tuned models in up to 1,000 languages are available upon request at 1 cent per word for the first 1 million words and 0.5 cents per word after that.

Text-to-speech pricing ranges from $0.14/minute to $1.14/minute depending on the language. While this service is available in over 1,000 languages, quality is known to vary considerably across this range. We are actively in the process of training new text-to-speech models to provide higher quality and an even broader range of languages.

Note that all users receive 5,000 words of free translation and 5 minutes of free text-to-speech each month, which we anticipate will be sufficient to test out that quality of the service.

Pricing

We aim to provide affordable and competitive pricing for Alpha2 services. Two tiers are available for translation, allowing for flexibility according to budget and project needs.

For more information on Alpha2, including how you can sign up for a free account, fill out our contact form at ai.sil.org/contact.