5 ms·

The following predictable chain of events will happen. Someone working at Google will read this blog post and report it internally. Google will contact Telegram

The following predictable chain of events will happen. Someone working at Google will read this blog post and report it internally. Google will contact Telegram and inform them that they are violating the Play Store agreement and could they please use the official API instead. Telegram will remove the feature as they can't spend the GDP of the Earth on translations. The end.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Don't know why they can't just roll their own... At this point you could probably even do reasonably well on-device.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I guess this would also be in a legal grey zone/break TOS, but I wonder if they could reuse the offline models the official Google Translate app downloads. > worst case you could just self host a translation service
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    What? How would this violate ToS? iirc even the Google translate app does on device translation. And worst case you could just self host a translation service. Google's translation is good, but it's not that much better than what you can get OSS. e: Misunderstood your comment (I believe the quote was at the top and you edited), now I see that you were referring to your idea as the potential ToS violation. I agree, you can't violate IP law in your app.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      As in, the translate models are owned by Google and AFAIK they don't allow anyone, even other developers, to use them. It's against ToS to use intellectual property/code/ml models/etc without permission from the owner > 11.2 If You use third-party materials, You represent and warrant that You have the right to distribute the third-party material in the Product. You agree that You will not submit material to Google Play that is subject to third -party Intellectual Property Rights unless You are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to submit the material. https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html#:~:text=11.2%20If%20You,submit%20the%20material https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreeme....
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      > Google's translation is good, but it's not that much better than what you can get OSS. Disagree on this one. For the languages of the European Union and a couple other outliers, sure it's close. For the long, long tail of languages software developers typically don't care about and are outside the wealthy world Google is the only thing that is remotely intelligible.
  - mikaraento 5y ago
    We do offer an official SDK that does that, see https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation (I work for Google but do not speak for it)
    - MiroF 5y ago
      I would trust a 3rd party on-device service slightly more, given that Google's incentives aren't exactly aligned with making that service high quality.
      - smeyer 5y ago
        I don't think their incentives are exactly misaligned with it being high quality, either. If better translation can get folks to see more ads, they might not care much about losing out potential api-based translation revenue.
- f311a 5y ago
  The entire dev team of Telegram is less than 30 people. That's why.
criticaltinker 5y ago
Another plausible alternative is that Telegram embeds an open source NLP model in the app so translation can be performed locally (offline). To be fair we know that mobile hardware resources can be extremely limited, and I’d wager a server side model will always be bigger and therefore better. But recently there’s been a lot of amazing progress in techniques to shrink large models down while preserving most of the accuracy (eg quantization aware training, etc). With some additional constraints on scope (maybe only supporting the handful of languages the user needs?), I believe a sharp team of a few experts could deliver this fairly quickly, with reasonable results that would of course improve over time.
- mikaraento 5y ago
  Google also provides an official on-device translation SDK that is free-as-in-beer (https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation). The models are around 20M for any single language so there is a not insignificant cost on the user in terms of delay for downloading, data usage and disk space. Disclaimer: I work for Google and worked on the ML Kit Translate SDK, but I don't speak for Google.
  - freemint 5y ago
    Is integration with some Google Services App required or do those models also run on de-googled Android distributions?
    - mikaraento 5y ago
      ML Kit only runs on devices with Play Services, sorry.
behnamoh 5y ago
Reminds me of this thread a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485904
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

whimsicalism 5y ago

Don't know why they can't just roll their own... At this point you could probably even do reasonably well on-device.

judge2020 5y ago
I guess this would also be in a legal grey zone/break TOS, but I wonder if they could reuse the offline models the official Google Translate app downloads. > worst case you could just self host a translation service
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  What? How would this violate ToS? iirc even the Google translate app does on device translation. And worst case you could just self host a translation service. Google's translation is good, but it's not that much better than what you can get OSS. e: Misunderstood your comment (I believe the quote was at the top and you edited), now I see that you were referring to your idea as the potential ToS violation. I agree, you can't violate IP law in your app.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    As in, the translate models are owned by Google and AFAIK they don't allow anyone, even other developers, to use them. It's against ToS to use intellectual property/code/ml models/etc without permission from the owner > 11.2 If You use third-party materials, You represent and warrant that You have the right to distribute the third-party material in the Product. You agree that You will not submit material to Google Play that is subject to third -party Intellectual Property Rights unless You are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to submit the material. https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html#:~:text=11.2%20If%20You,submit%20the%20material https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreeme....
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    > Google's translation is good, but it's not that much better than what you can get OSS. Disagree on this one. For the languages of the European Union and a couple other outliers, sure it's close. For the long, long tail of languages software developers typically don't care about and are outside the wealthy world Google is the only thing that is remotely intelligible.
- mikaraento 5y ago
  We do offer an official SDK that does that, see https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation (I work for Google but do not speak for it)
  - MiroF 5y ago
    I would trust a 3rd party on-device service slightly more, given that Google's incentives aren't exactly aligned with making that service high quality.
    - smeyer 5y ago
      I don't think their incentives are exactly misaligned with it being high quality, either. If better translation can get folks to see more ads, they might not care much about losing out potential api-based translation revenue.
f311a 5y ago
The entire dev team of Telegram is less than 30 people. That's why.

criticaltinker 5y ago

Another plausible alternative is that Telegram embeds an open source NLP model in the app so translation can be performed locally (offline). To be fair we know that mobile hardware resources can be extremely limited, and I’d wager a server side model will always be bigger and therefore better. But recently there’s been a lot of amazing progress in techniques to shrink large models down while preserving most of the accuracy (eg quantization aware training, etc). With some additional constraints on scope (maybe only supporting the handful of languages the user needs?), I believe a sharp team of a few experts could deliver this fairly quickly, with reasonable results that would of course improve over time.

mikaraento 5y ago
Google also provides an official on-device translation SDK that is free-as-in-beer (https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/language/translation). The models are around 20M for any single language so there is a not insignificant cost on the user in terms of delay for downloading, data usage and disk space. Disclaimer: I work for Google and worked on the ML Kit Translate SDK, but I don't speak for Google.
- freemint 5y ago
  Is integration with some Google Services App required or do those models also run on de-googled Android distributions?
  - mikaraento 5y ago
    ML Kit only runs on devices with Play Services, sorry.

behnamoh 5y ago

Reminds me of this thread a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485904

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]