NEW YORK — Google on Wednesday announced plans to build an artificial intelligence model that would eventually enable its services to be offered online in the world’s 1,000 most spoken languages.

“Imagine a new internet user in Africa who speaks Wolof (…) and uses his phone to ask where the nearest pharmacy is or what channel the African Cup of Nations football match is on,” explains Johan Schalkwyk, a researcher at Google.

“These are situations that we take for granted. But they are far from accessible to everyone in the world,” he added during a presentation to journalists on the group’s latest innovations in the field of artificial intelligence.

There are more than 7,000 languages ​​in the world, but Google, for example, only offers its translation tool for just over 130 of them.

The Californian company relies on technological advances to build its new model of artificial intelligence, such as the ability to work not only with text available on the Internet, but also with videos, images and words.

The group also strives to collect a wide range of audio excerpts from the different communities, especially for languages ​​that are not necessarily widely written.

As the project progresses, which will last several years, Google plans to integrate its advances into its products, including YouTube, its digital keyboards and its translation tool, to facilitate the use of online services in the native language of the Internet users and enable them to find relevant content.

Among other advances made possible by artificial intelligence, Google has also developed tools that allow wildfires to be identified and monitored in real time using satellite imagery.

The company then makes this information available on Google Maps and its search engine, helping to warn the population of the danger and help emergency services predict how the fires may develop and spread.

This service is now available in the United States, Canada, Mexico and parts of Australia.

The initiative builds on a 2017 flood warning project that sent out 155 million notifications to 23 million people in India and Bangladesh last year.

Google announced on Wednesday that it has expanded this service to 18 more countries in South America, Asia and Africa.