Google's new tool teaches you ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
Fabricius aims to use machine learning to help out Egyptologists.
Google wants to teach you to read and write ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs with the launch of a new tool: Fabricius is available for free on the Google Art and Culture website and app starting Wednesday.
Fabricius' virtual Egyptologist guides you through six steps on your way to learning ancient hieroglyphs. After finishing up each step, you can translate your own messages to hieroglyphics to share with friends and family through the site's "Play" tab.
Fabricius was made in collaboration with the Australian Center for Egyptology at Macquarie University, Psycle Interactive, Assassin's Creed Origins developer Ubisoft and Egyptologists from around the globe to facilitate researchers' work, Google said.
"So far, experts had to dig manually through books upon books to translate and decipher the ancient language--a process that has remained virtually unchanged for over a century," Chance Coughenour, Google Arts and Culture program manager, said in a release. "Fabricius includes the first digital tool -- that decodes Egyptian hieroglyphs built on machine learning."
The tool is being released as open source and Fabricius could be expanded to other ancient languages in the future, Google noted.
