"Over the next couple of weeks, these improvements are coming to Google Translate in many more languages, starting right now with Hindi, Russian and Vietnamese," Barak Turovsky, who is responsible for product management for Google Translate, said in a release.

The service, which translates entire sentences rather than just phrases, is currently available in English to French and seven other languages. The others are German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish.

"Neural translation is a lot better than our previous technology, because we translate whole sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence," he said.

The multilingual system is based on machine learning that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Previous systems translated words and phrases independently within a sentence.

Google has become one of the leading providers of an AI-based translation platform by becoming the first to introduce the NMT system.

Last month, Google scored higher than its rival AI machines in a translation battle between humans and machines held in South Korea. A group of four professional translators competed against three AI-powered programs provided by Google, South Korea's top Internet provider Naver Inc. and leading automated interpretation company Systran International. (Yonhap)