[throwaway2474]

Transportation, not healthcare. High speed rail is ridiculously good, it connects just about every major Chinese city, it’s affordable, very comfortable and fast. I would consider healthcare an exception, it may be affordable but outside of a few expensive clinics in Beijing and Shanghai it’s really bad. Mobile payments are way ahead of other places (you can pay any random person you meet instantly with your phone, and that’s been the case for at least 5 years). Any kind of logistics/delivery (food, online shopping, post etc) is very fast and cheap and this has a lot of flow-on effects in terms of convenience and lifestyle.

Basic research in (for example) AI is probably on par with the west, I think it’s fair to say the engineering/applied side is ahead. This is helped by essentially zero concern for privacy = more data. WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. Any kind of large scale tech that has anything to do with surveillance, things like CV, deep-packet inspection, would be unmatched I’d say.

It’s definitely not free of racism.

[Wowfunhappy]

> WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google.

That's interesting!

At the same time, deepl.com is also miles ahead of Google, so I'm not all that impressed by Google Translate anymore. (Deepl itself is impressive is heck!)

[throwaway2474]

It may be a case of Google lagging behind others yeah, I’m not overly familiar with translators other than as a casual user. WeChat is very “smoothed” in that it gives you something that makes grammatical sense and sounds native, in preference to being a direct translation. Which usually works really well but occasionally gives hilarious results. It also seems to take the context of the conversation into account rather than just the message you’re translating.

[ma2rten]

Are you sure about that? I think DeepL was ahead for a brief time after it was released, but Google Translate has caught up.

[Wowfunhappy]

For me it's absolutely night and day, the translations produced by Deepl feel like they could have been written by a real person. That real person wouldn't be a particularly good writer, but, still, it's highly readable.

I could see myself reading a whole book through Deepl if I had a reason.

[ma2rten]

Yeah, I take that back. DeepL is better (again), although it is highly dependent on which languages you translate and which context.

Quite impressive, especially that DeepL (and every other machine translation application) makes use of research done at Google.