Last week Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian digital giant, announced a novelty in the field of image-to-text and automated translation technologies. Its browser, Yandex Browser, is now capable of translating text embedded within images “from 47 languages,” says the company, touting the feature as a world’s first for a desktop browser.

“Now users can easily translate and read [an] image that contain text written in a foreign language; [they just] need to right-click on [the] image.”

Users can also immediately translate all the images on a web page: this is possible via the translator menu in Yandex Browser’s address bar.

After the words are recognized by a computer vision technology, the text is sent to Yandex Translate, which instantly translates the words and then superimposes the translated text back onto the image.

As examples of use cases, the company cites scans of user manuals, newspapers or magazines, comics, instructions and ingredients printed on foreign packaging, and much more.

The new feature is already available on the Windows desktop version of Yandex Browser and is in beta testing on Android devices. Roll out across other desktop platforms will come soon, says Yandex, with iOS devices following by the end of 2021.

“As the first one on the market, this built-in feature provides a seamless alternative to other services that require users to install an extension onto their desktop browser,” says Yandex.

Launched in 2012, Yandex Browser is now available in 14 languages. Yandex reports a monthly audience of 35 million users on desktop and 37 million mobile users worldwide.

The Yandex Translate automated translation service uses neural machine learning technologies to automatically translate words and expressions, text within images, websites and mobile applications. The service knows more than 90 languages. In late 2020, Yandex offered the first-ever book translated “in less than a minute” by AI from English into Russian, intended for a mainstream audience.