vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Contact your sales representative or customer support for information about how to use the Language Translator API to accomplish the tasks supported by the Language Translator tool.





 1 September 2016 

Service rebranding
: The IBM Watson™ Language Translation service was rebranded as the Language Translator service.





 22 March 2016 

New language support
: Support for additional languages was added: English to and from Italian, and Spanish to and from French.





 3 December 2015 

Customization no longer available with Standard plan
: As of January 15, 2016, all customization capabilities within the Standard plan are discontinued. Applications that do not use customization features do not need to change, as the Standard plan remains active for all API calls unrelated to customization or customized models. To use the GA customization features (the Trainable plan) of the Language Translator service with an IBM Cloud® application that uses an earlier instance of the service, complete the following steps:



1. Create a new Watson Language Translator instance and specify the GA "Trainable" plan.
2. Bind the new "Trainable" instance of the service to your app in IBM Cloud.
3. Gather the data that was used to initially create the customized models.
4. Upload the training data to create new customized models on the "Trainable" instance.
5. In your app, point the "ModelID" field to the new customized models.
6. Unbind the earlier service from your app in IBM Cloud, and then delete it.







 6 November 2015 

Beta tooling available
: The beta Language Translator tool is released. The tool is a web application that provides a graphical user interface to manage and train models for more accurate machine translation. You can create projects, upload training data, train custom models, and translate text.





 1 December 2014 

Beta machine translation and language identification APIs upgraded
: The beta Machine Translator and beta Language Identification APIs have been upgraded and combined into the Language Translator API. To immediately start using the new service, understand and update your code to reflect these changes:



* New model_id parameter: In the beta API, you defined the sid parameter to select the model to use for translation. In this version, the sid parameter is renamed to model_id parameter.
The Speech to Text service offers three interfaces for speech recognition: a WebSocket interface, a synchronous HTTP interface, and an asynchronous HTTP interface. The interfaces let you specify the language of your audio and its format and sampling rate. They also provide many parameters that you can use to tailor how you request audio and the information that the service sends in response. You can also request metrics about the service's analysis of your audio and the audio itself.



* For more information about the speech recognition interfaces, see [Recognizing speech with the service](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-service-featuresfeatures-recognition) in the service features.
* For more information about the speech recognition parameters, see [Using speech recognition parameters](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-service-featuresfeatures-parameters) in the service features.







 Customization 

The service provides a customization interface that you can use to tune speech recognition for your language and acoustic requirements. You can expand the vocabulary of a model with domain-specific terminology or adapt a model for the acoustic characteristics of your audio. You can also add grammars to restrict the phrases that the service can recognize. For more information, see [Customizing the service](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-service-featuresfeatures-customization) in the service features.





 Language support 

The service supports many languages and dialects:



* Arabic (Modern Standard)
* Chinese (Mandarin)
* Czech
* Dutch (Belgian and Netherlands)
* English (Australian, Indian, United Kingdom, and United States)
* French (Canadian and France)
* German
* Hindi (Indian)
* Italian
* Japanese
* Korean
* Portuguese (Brazilian)
* Spanish (Castilian and Latin American)
* Swedish
For more information about installing and managing the service, see [Installing Watson Speech to Text](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-data/4.0?topic=text-installing-watson-speech).

New Brazilian Portuguese pt-BR_Multimedia next-generation model
: The service now offers a next-generation multimedia model for Brazilian Portuguese: pt-BR_Multimedia. The new model supports low latency and is generally available. It also supports language model customization and grammars. For more information about the next-generation models and low latency, see



* [Next-generation languages and models](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-models-ng)
* [Customization support for next-generation models](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-custom-supportcustom-language-support-ng)
* [Low latency](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-interimlow-latency)



Update to German de-DE_Multimedia next-generation model to support low latency
: The next-generation German model, de-DE_Multimedia, now supports low latency. You do not need to upgrade custom models that are based on the updated German base model. For more information about the next-generation models and low latency, see



* [Next-generation languages and models](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-models-ng)
* [Low latency](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-interimlow-latency)



New beta character_insertion_bias parameter for next-generation models
: All next-generation models now support a new beta parameter, character_insertion_bias, which is available with all speech recognition interfaces.
[Dutch (Netherlands) symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-nlSymbols-new) All versions 
 [English (Australian) symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-auSymbols-new) All versions 
 [English (United Kingdom) symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-gbSymbols) All versions 
 [English (United States) symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-usSymbols) All versions 
 [French (Canadian) symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-caSymbols) All versions 
 [French (France) symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-frSymbols) All versions 
 [German symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-deSymbols) All versions 
 [Italian symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-itSymbols) All versions 
 [Japanese symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-jaSymbols) All versions 
 [Korean symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-koSymbols-new) All versions 
 [Portuguese (Brazilian) symbols](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-ptSymbols) All versions
For more information, see [The say-as element](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-elementssay-as_element).





 1 April 2020 

New Korean standard voices: ko-KR_YoungmiVoice and ko-KR_YunaVoice
: The service now supports two standard female Korean voices: ko-KR_YoungmiVoice and ko-KR_YunaVoice. The following information applies to both Korean voices:



* The voices are beta functionality. They might not be ready for production use and are subject to change. They are initial offerings that are expected to improve in quality with time and usage.
* The voices support customization and the /v1/pronunciation method.
* The voices support the <mark> element and the timings parameter that are available with the WebSocket interface.
* The voices support all Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) elements except for expressive SSML and voice transformation SSML.
* The voices support only the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), not IBM Symbolic Phonetic Representation (SPR), with the <phoneme> element.



New feature support for Arabic, Chinese, and Netherlands Dutch voices
: The beta Arabic, Chinese, and Netherlands Dutch voices now support the following features:



* Customization and the /v1/pronunciation method.
* The <mark> element and the timings parameter that are available with the WebSocket interface.



See the following sections for additional information:



* For more information about all available voices, see [Languages and voices](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-voices).
* For more information about using the WebSocket interface to obtain word timings, see [Generating word timings](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-timing).
* For more information about customization, see [Understanding customization](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-customIntro).
In some cases, it might seem that a custom model trained with a parallel corpus is ignoring a specific example that you provided. In these cases, try searching your training data for other sentences that might be influencing the translation behavior, or consider using a forced glossary if you want to control a specific translation.







 Supported document formats for training data 

You can provide your training data for customization in the following document formats.



Table 1. Document formats for training data

 Format Extension Description 

 [TMX](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/language-translator?topic=language-translator-customizingtmx) .tmx Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) is an XML specification for the exchange of translation memories. 
 [XLIFF](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/language-translator?topic=language-translator-customizingxliff) .xliff XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) is an XML specification for the exchange of translation memories. 
 [CSV](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/language-translator?topic=language-translator-customizingcsv) .csv Comma-separated values (CSV) file with two columns for aligned sentences and phrases. The first row contains the language code. 
 [TSV](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/language-translator?topic=language-translator-customizingtsv) .tsv, .tab Tab-separated values (TSV) file with two columns for aligned sentences and phrases. The first row contains the language code. 
 [JSON](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/language-translator?topic=language-translator-customizingjson) .json Custom JSON format for specifying aligned sentences and phrases. 
 [Microsoft Excel](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/language-translator?topic=language-translator-customizingexcel) .xls, .xlsx Excel file with the first two columns for aligned sentences and phrases. The first row contains the language code. 



All formats have in common that they specify an alignment of translated text segments (sentences or phrases).
* [View on GitHub](https://github.com/with-watson/multilingual-chatbot)
* [Try the demo](https://multilingual-chatbot.mybluemix.net/)
* [Read more](https://medium.com/ibm-watson/build-multilingual-chatbots-with-watson-language-translator-watson-assistant-8c38247e8af1)







 Real-time translation (Node.js) 

By using Node.js and React components, you can create a web app that can be your personal translator. The app uses Watson Speech to Text, Watson Language Translator, and Watson Text to Speech services to transcribe, translate, and synthesize from your microphone to your headphones.



* [Code Pattern](https://developer.ibm.com/components/watson-apis/patterns/build-a-real-time-translation-service-with-watson-api-kit)
* [View on GitHub](https://github.com/ibm/watson-speech-translator)







 Korean Character Recognition (TensorFlow, Android) 

This mobile application uses TensorFlow and Language Translator to recognize and translate handwritten Korean characters.



* [View on GitHub](https://github.com/IBM/tensorflow-hangul-recognition)
: A new language, Czech, with a new female voice, cs-CZ_AlenaVoice, is now available. The voice is a neural voice.

New Belgian Dutch neural voice: nl-BE_BramVoice
: A new male Belgian Dutch (Flemish) voice, nl-BE_BramVoice, is now available. The voice is a neural voice.

Defect fix: Improve SSML and speech synthesis
: Defect fix: The following defects for the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) and speech synthesis were fixed with this release:



* The pitch attribute of the <prosody> element is now applied to all specified text. Previously, the pitch change was not always applied to the first word of the affected text. Also, the documentation now includes additional guidance about specifying a pitch value. For more information, see [The pitch attribute](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-elementsprosody-pitch).
* Speech synthesis of Japanese text now speaks the audio more slowly. Previously, the synthesized speech was being spoken too quickly. If you find that synthesis of Japanese text is still spoken too quickly for your application, use the rate attribute of the SSML <prosody> element to control the rate of speech. For more information, see [The rate attribute](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-elementsprosody-rate).
* Neural voices now parse the escaped apostrophe character (') properly. Previously, some neural voices were not interpreting the character properly.







 22 October 2021 

Multiple neural voice improvements
: The existing neural voices for Chinese, Dutch (Belgian and Netherlands), Australian English, and Korean have been updated for improved speech synthesis and enhanced audio results. For more information about all available voices, see [Languages and voices](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-voices).

New Australian English neural voice: en-AU_SteveVoice
For more information about all available languages and voices, see [Languages and voices](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-voices).

Deprecated standard voices are removed from the documentation
: The standard concatenative voices were deprecated on [2 December 2020](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-release-notestext-to-speech-2december2020). These standard voices have now been removed from the API reference. The topic Migrating from standard to neural voices has also been removed from the page [Languages and voices](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/text-to-speech?topic=text-to-speech-voices).

Similarly, the former name of the Arabic voice, ar-AR_OmarVoice, was deprecated at the same time. It too has been removed from the documentation. Use the voice ar-MS_OmarVoice instead.





 28 February 2022 

Change to word timing response for WebSocket interface
: The response object that the service sends when you request word timings with the WebSocket interface has changed. The service now sends word timing results in a single array that includes a string followed by two floats:

{
"words": [
"Hello", 0.0, 0.259],
"world", 0.259, 0.532]
]
}

The service previously sent timing results as an array that included a string following by an array of two floats:

{
"words": [
"Hello", 0.0629826778195474, 0.2590192737303819]],
"world", 0.2598829173456253, 0.5322130804452672]]
]
}

Also, the level of precision for word timings and marks is now reduced to three decimal places.
See [Defining intents](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-intents-create-task) and [Defining entities](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-entitiesentities-creating-task) for information about working with these tabs.





 30 November 2017 

Eastern Arabic numeral support
: Eastern Arabic numerals are now supported in Arabic system entities.





 29 November 2017 

Improving understanding of user input across workspaces
: You can now improve a workspace with utterances that were sent to other workspaces within your instance. For example, you might have multiple versions of production workspaces and development workspaces; you can use the same utterance data to improve any of these workspaces. See [Improving across workspaces](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-logslogs-deploy-id).





 20 November 2017 

GB18030 compliance
: GB18030 is a Chinese standard that specifies an extended code page for use in the Chinese market. This code page standard is important for the software industry because the China National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee has mandated that any software application that is released for the Chinese market after September 1, 2001, be enabled for GB18030. The Watson Assistant service supports this encoding, and is certified GB18030-compliant.





 9 November 2017 

Intent examples can directly reference entities
: You can now specify an entity reference directly in an intent example. That entity reference, along with all its values or synonyms, is used by the Watson Assistant service classifier for training the intent. For more information, see [Entity as example](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-intentsintents-entity-as-example) in the [Intents](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-intents) topic.

Currently, you can only directly reference closed entities that you define.
12 January 2018 

New Neural Machine Translation Models
: New Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are available to preview. You can try NMT models for the following language pairs.



* English to and from: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, and Turkish
* French to and from: German, Spanish
* German to and from: Italian



The NMT models and the syntax for using them are subject to change during the preview period. Currently, NMT models do not support corpus customization. Only forced glossary customization is supported.

To use an NMT preview model to translate, specify the header X-Watson-Technology-Preview:2017-07-01 along with the character codes for the source and target languages of the model you want to use. The following example shows how to translate English to Spanish with an NMT preview model.

curl -X POST --user {username}:{password} -H "Accept: application/json" -H "X-Watson-Technology-Preview:2017-07-01" -d '{"text":"Hello!","source":"en","target":"es"}' "https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/language-translator/api/v2/translate"





 15 December 2016 

New translation models
: New translation models were added: English to and from Japanese





 15 November 2016 

Beta tooling no longer available or supported
: The beta tooling that was previously available for the Language Translator service is no longer available or supported. Contact your sales representative or customer support for information about how to use the Language Translator API to accomplish the tasks supported by the Language Translator tool.





 1 September 2016 

Service rebranding
: The IBM Watson™ Language Translation service was rebranded as the Language Translator service.





 22 March 2016 

New language support
: Support for additional languages was added: English to and from Italian, and Spanish to and from French.





 3 December 2015 

Customization no longer available with Standard plan
: As of January 15, 2016, all customization capabilities within the Standard plan are discontinued.
You can learn about the latest type system on the [Entity types and subtypes (Version 2)](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/natural-language-understanding?topic=natural-language-understanding-entity-types-version-2) page. When your application is compatible with the new type system, change the version date parameter in your requests to 2018-11-16 to use the new model.





 9 November 2018 

Categories improvement
: Major improvement in accuracy for Categories in all supported languages.





 8 November 2018 

Service instances can be created in Tokyo location
: You can now create Natural Language Understanding service instances in the IBM Cloud Tokyo location.





 5 November 2018 

Support for Concepts in Italian
: Added support for Italian concepts.







 30 October 2018 

IAM used for service instances
: As of 30 October 2018, new service instances created in the Germany and US South regions use [Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/natural-language-understanding?topic=natural-language-understanding-release-notesiam-auth-process).





 21 September 2018 

Language support improvements
: Added support for French relations and Portuguese concepts.
: The targeted sentiment option is now supported for French and Portuguese keywords.
: Improved French keywords.
: Improved Korean sentiment.
: Improved Portuguese keywords and sentiment.
: Released a new Portuguese entities model with the latest entity type system. You can learn about the latest type system on the [Entity types and subtypes (Version 2)](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/natural-language-understanding?topic=natural-language-understanding-entity-types-version-2) page. When your application is compatible with the new type system, change the version date parameter in your requests to 2018-09-21 to use the new model.





 June 2018 



 26 June 2018 

Added support for Japanese entities and keywords.
: For Japanese input, the following entities are not yet supported:



* Number
* Percent
* PhoneNumber
* URL



IPv6 addresses in Japanese input are not yet detectable as IPAddress entities.





 12 June 2018
Usage FAQs 

FAQs for IBM Watson® Speech to Text include questions about speech recognition, audio transmission, customization, and other topics. To find all FAQs for IBM Cloud®, see the [FAQ library](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/faqs).



 How do I access my service credentials? 

How you access your service credentials depends on whether you are using Speech to Text with IBM Cloud® or IBM Cloud Pak® for Data. For more information about obtaining your credentials for both versions, see [Before you begin](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-gettingStartedgetting-started-before-you-begin) in the getting started tutorial.

Once you have your service credentials, see the following topics for information about authenticating to the service:



* [Authenticating to IBM Cloud](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson?topic=watson-iamgs-credential-cloud)
* [Authenticating to IBM Cloud Pak for Data](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson?topic=watson-iamgs-credential-cpd)







 What languages does the service support? 

The Speech to Text service supports both previous-generation and next-generation languages and models. Most languages support both broadband/multimedia and narrowband/telephony models, which have minimum sampling rates of 16 kHz and 8 kHz, respectively. For more information about the available models and the features they support for all languages, see the following topics:



* [Previous-generation languages and models](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-models)
* [Next-generation languages and models](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/speech-to-text?topic=speech-to-text-models-ng)







 What are the input audio formats? 

The service supports many audio formats (MIME types). Different formats support different sampling rates and other characteristics.