Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA)’s international arm has unveiled an updated version of its artificial intelligence translation tool that is supposedly superior to most competitors in the market. Dubbed Marco MT, the AI-powered tool supports 15 languages: Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, French, English, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, and Polish.
According to Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group vice president and head of the firm’s artificial intelligence arm Kaifu Zhang, the idea behind the AI translation tool is to help merchants generate more revenue for themselves as their performance also affects the platform’s bottom line. Alibaba says an assessment of its new AI translation tool by FloRes, a translation benchmark framework for machine translation between low-resource languages and English, found Marco MT to be superior to similar AU translation services provided by ChatGPT, DeepL, and Google.
The recently updated Marco MT translation tool was unveiled nearly one year ago and Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group says it has already attracted half a million merchant users. Marco MT allows sellers in one country to create product pages in another country’s language, allowing them easier access to foreign markets.
Kaifu Zhang says that since the updated version was only based on LLMs (large language models), it can use contextual clues such as industry jargon or even different cultures to create better translations. Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group used Alibaba’s artificial intelligence application, Qwen, as a basis for Marco TM.
With Chinese e-commerce merchants increasingly looking to foreign nations for growth opportunities in recent years, the AI-powered translation tool is already drawing significant interest. Furthermore, Zhang says that developing nations accounted for nearly 50% of the 20 most active AI tools after Alibaba categorized the suppliers using Alibaba.com by country.
Alibaba also says merchants have used Marco TM for over 100 million product listings since Alibaba unveiled the first version last fall. Although Zhang declined to share the updated version’s price, the prior version was charged based on the amount of translated text. Even so, he says contextual translations will make the new version of Marco MT more attractive to customers by allowing merchants to express themselves more authentically in other languages.
The Chinese e-commerce giant’s international ventures include Taobao, Tmall, Lazada, and AliExpress. Lazada primarily serves the Southeast Asian market, while Taobao and Tmall mostly focus on the massive Chinese market. Alibaba also launched an English AI-powered version of the Taobao app in Singapore in September due to its popularity with Singaporean consumers.
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