Facebook today announced that the built-in artificial intelligence assistant in Messenger is now capable of translating messages from Spanish and English. The feature works the other way around as well so users will be able to get their messages translated from English to Spanish as well inside the app. This feature has gone live for all users in the United States and Mexico starting today.
Facebook introduced the M’s translation suggestions feature at its F8 developers’ conference last month. It was billed as yet another tool that would facilitate conversations between buyers and sellers in Facebook Marketplace. It’s not limited to that, though.
Starting today, users in the United States and Mexico will receive a “Translate to English/Spanish” prompt when they receive a message from someone in either language. When they tap on this prompt, the assistant will ask them if they would like to enable automatic translation for all messages that they receive from that particular friend in the future.
Users will be able to opt out of this feature at any time that they want. Facebook is going to expand this feature’s capabilities to offer translation for a variety of other languages as well but it’s going to take some time before that happens.
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