Google says it plans to expand its base in Britain, creating up to 3,000 jobs — good news for the government as the prospect of leaving the European Union breeds economic uncertainty.
The tech firm currently has about 4,000 staff in Britain.
CEO Sundar Pichai says Google will build a 650,000 sq. foot (60,000 sq. meter) complex alongside its new facility in the King’s Cross area of London.
Treasury chief Philip Hammond said Tuesday’s announcement is a “big vote of confidence in Britain’s leading position as a global tech hub.”
Pichai told the BBC that Britain remains an attractive place to do business — but that open borders and free movement of skilled workers are important.
It’s unclear what border rules will be imposed once Britain leaves the EU.
Google is also promising that its widely used translation service is now even more fluent, thanks to an advance that’s enabling its computers to interpret complete sentences.
That may sound simple, but it took years of engineering to pull off. Until now, Google’s technology analyzed phrases in pieces and then cobbled together a sometimes stilted translation.
Now that Google’s machines can interpret entire sentences, the translations of extended passages of text should read and sound much more like a native speaker of the language.
Google described its “neural machine” tool as the biggest leap for its translation service in a decade.
Starting Tuesday, the technology is being be used to translate phrases to and from English and eight other languages — French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish.

Source: Arab News