Facebook is betting on a new kind of artificial intelligence (AI) software to break down language barriers and bring its users closer together. The social media giant has just rolled out a new feature called “multilingual composer” for some user accounts, after testing the software on Pages (special pages for business and brands) earlier this year.

The multilingual composer allows Facebook users to craft a post in their own language, and have it translated into any of the 45 different languages the social media network currently supports. Once your post has been published, the software uses data such as a user’s location, preferred language settings and commonly used languages to decide which language the post should be displayed in.

It couldn’t be simpler to create a multilingual post: all you have to do is type a post, click on a pull down menu, add the languages you want, then click “post” and you’re done.

In its announcement, Facebook noted that around half of its users are non-native English speakers, and as such the feature could be a very useful one for businesses that use social media to advertise and engage with consumers. After all, the more people that see their ads and posts, the more visibility the brand gains, the better it is for them and Facebook (which gets paid for ads).

Many businesses that use Facebook currently have to go through the rather laborious task of crafting the same message in multiple languages if they wish to reach a wider audience. They then have to publish each message in the same post, and that means users have to waste time scrolling down to their own language – and many probably don’t bother doing that, which means businesses are potentially losing out. The only alternative was to create different pages for different languages, but that’s a time consuming endeavor in itself. With multilingual composer, Facebook seems to have found a much better solution.

On the face of it, it sounds like a good idea, but one analyst said he worries that Facebook will find it challenging to accurately translate user’s messages so the true meaning is conveyed. If it can’t do that, it could cause lots of upset among users (and especially advertisers and brands), if the mistranslation is perceived negative in any way.

“It’s a very tough task to accurately make posts and comments multilingual,” said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy to ComputerWorld. “Perfect language translation is a chore, but slang, humor and sarcasm are even more difficult. Just think of how many times young kids talk to you in your language and they still don’t know what you are saying.”

Image credit: Facebook