7 languages and a feature nobody to a rounding error uses? No, I don't consider that to be a research, economic, or technical success.
Honestly, I'm not sure if you posted this is support of Horizon or against? The Horizon budget for 2021-2027 is €95.5 billion or ~€15 billion per annum. If a headline "success" is an unfinished implementation of translation in Firefox of a translation engine (Marian) built by the Microsoft Translator team, then it's safe to say Horizon is an unqualified failure.
I don't have the numbers at hand or know if they're even public somewhere, but telemetry shows that Firefox Translations is used a lot. Definitely on the list of successful new Firefox features.
(I'm a Mozilla employee, but I have not worked on Firefox Translations.)
Do they? I tried opening a French government site[1] and received the Firefox pop-up offering to translate the page. I did not have to enable anything in settings neither is the French language model downloaded. It seems translations are enabled by default.
I stand corrected on this point, the language packs now auto-download.
It's still a niche feature only partially built by a Horizon project (it was almost entirely built by commercial entities - MS and Mozilla) in a niche browser.
It's an indictment of the Horizon programme that this is considered the pre-eminent success story.
Its actually helped me a twice the last two weeks and I would browse mostly English language sites and I imagine it would be great if English wasn't your first language.
I didn't even know it was a new Firefox feature but I thought it was cool.
If the EU invests into research and development of a feature that a US tech company already offers (as a proprietary, closed-source service), it's needless duplication and a futile effort in catching up.
Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
> If the EU invests into research and development of a feature that a US tech company already offers (as a proprietary, closed-source service), it's needless duplication and a futile effort in catching up.
The example we're talking about is powered by a Marian, developed and open-sourced by a US multinational, Microsoft.
The Horizon project was to use that to create a Firefox plugin, which they did.
Another US multinational, Mozilla, later integrated into Firefox.
Firefox has 4.55% market share in Europe.
> Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
You are presenting a false and frankly bad faith dichotomy.
I believe to the order of millions of translations per day, but again, I don't remember where to view this, so might not be correct. But it's definitely orders of magnitude larger than 100s of users.
(And indeed, as a sibling comment points out, the feature is suggested to users in context, which of course massively helps with discoverability, so it's no surprise to me that it's used way more often than the extension.)
Can you, please, share a source for the claims you make about Marian? Specifically, "developed and open-sourced by a US multinational, Microsoft" and "funded by MS" (from two other comments by you)?
It does look like Microsoft is (was) funding the project, and employs one of the authors as head of research at Microsoft Translator, which is great, but all the "seed" funding and actual research happened in EU. Microsoft hired the author only in 2018 [1], while the earliest EU grant was allocated in 2015 [2], and the main paper they published says "it has mainly been developed at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the University of Edinburgh" [3].
Where did you get 7 languages from? It's like 30 right now, with new ones being added regularly.
What's unfinished about it?
And Marian also received 6 grants via Horizon, in cooperation with the exact same universities (the one in Edinburgh being the main one), so I'm not sure what's your point?
And did I try to list every success or one tangible example, as the parent asked?
The Horizon/Bergamot project ended with seven languages. Anything thereafter was added separately.
> What's unfinished about it?
The project ended with an unfinished implementation.
> And Marian was also funded by Horizon, also in cooperation with the exact same universities, so I'm not sure what's your point?
No, Marian was funded by MS.
You are revising history extraordinarily to make the most unimpressive project appear better than it was. If Bergamot achieved all its goals and was the exemplar of Horizon, Horizon would be a complete failure.
As it was, the project limped over the line unfinished to be picked up by Mozilla.
Huh? Most Firefox users presumably use it, and anyway it's obviously essential and extremely useful functionality.
And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
> Huh? Most Firefox users presumably use it, and anyway it's obviously essential and extremely useful functionality.
~~Only Firefox users who explicitly enable offline translation per langauge in Settings use this feature~~, which will be a tiny minority of users in a browser with a tiny (~2.5%) market share.
I'm wrong, the language packs now auto-download.
> And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
Well, those weren't the seven languages supported by the Bergamot project when it ended. Only two of your seven were supported: Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Polish, and Spanish.
Also money will be better spent with one common language instead of wasting so much time, resources and inconveniencing people with so many languages in this area.
Directly funded by Horizon, made by a consortium of 4 European universities, now a part of Firefox?