The National Weather Service (NWS) has been using artificial intelligence (AI) software to provide weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Simplified Chinese, the most common languages in the United States after English.

The AI model has reduced the time needed to translate National Hurricane Center storm products from 1 hour to less than 10 minutes, allowing Spanish forecasters to focus more time on their core duties of forecasting and decision support services.

The agency has teamed up with Lilt, a machine learning company specializing in large language models focused on multilingual customer experiences, to provide the new translation services.