Google Korea on Tuesday unveiled its latest services -- Google Translate and Google PhotoScan -- using highly advanced operations in artificial intelligence.

“The main breakthrough (of the Neural Machine Translation) is that translations are made in one sentence, rather than bits, so it’s more accurate and natural,” Barak Turovsky, a group product manager for Google Translate, told reporters through a video call from California.

As for the aim of Google Translate, Turovsky said Google hopes to create a world where language is not a barrier for communication.

NMT first processes a number of different translations for each sentence, then it chooses the most appropriate or makes final adjustments based on context.

Turvosky emphasized the basics of the system are comparable to the human brain, which comprehends texts by sentences and overall context.

Google Translate has reduced translation errors by up to 85 percent while translating three times faster than when it used the previous Phrase-Based Machine Translation, the company said.

PBMT refers to the system that translates breaks down each sentence into phrases for translation.

NMT applied translation began service on Nov. 13 free of charge. It currently provides translations from English to eight languages that are used by a third of the world’s population, including Korean.

Google plans to expand the service to 103 languages, covering 99 percent of languages used online.

The multilingual learning model of NMT cuts the trouble of working on every language by training similar languages with the same model, Turvosky explained, adding that Korean, Japanese and Turkish were trained with one model.

Meanwhile, Google PhotoScan is a mobile application made to bring back to life forgotten old photos by digitalizing them.

Using the free app, anyone with a camera on their phone can keep high definition digital copies of printed photos without glare, which has been pointed to as the biggest problem when taking pictures of print photos.

Users can either back up the scanned image on the camera roll or via the Google Photos service, boosting the number of digital images to unprecedented levels, the company said.

Google Photos is a free unlimited image storage service, designed for users to conveniently search for images via facial recognition technology.

Users can search for a specific person by clicking a photo of the person’s face, explained James Gallagher, a director of engineering for Google Photos.

They can also pull up photos by typing in a key word in the search engine, just as they would on Gmail.

Meanwhile, Google’s new features have invited challenges, with rivals such as Apple openly criticizing its Photos Backup, citing user privacy issue.

Four days after the release of Google Photos Backup, Apple CEO Tim Cook was reported as saying: “We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called ‘free services,’ but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for God knows what advertising purpose. And we think, someday, customers will see this for what it is.”

Google Korea was not immediately available for comments on such criticism.

By Kim Bo-gyung (lisakim425@heraldcorp.com)