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Google Smartphones to Translate Languages in Real Time
Google is developing software which, it says, will be able to carry out instant translations of conversations on mobile phones.
The company says that its new voice recognition system would enable people to communicate without understanding each other’s language. It is based on the company’s existing software for automatically converting documents and websites into a different language, according to the Daily Mail.
However, up to now, Google’s automatically translated text has been strewn with grammatical errors, and voice recognition technology is not yet ready to handle the full range of regional accents, say linguists.
Undeterred, Google believes that this exciting new technology will be available on mobile phones in the next two years. The Nexus One, launched last year, already features voice recognition technology, but the real breakthrough in communication is the latter’s combination with automatic translation software.
The new system, when it is perfected, will enable people to talk to each other on their mobile phones even when they both speak different languages, as their speech will be automatically translated.
The Google mobile phone would act like a human interpreter. It would wait to hear short chunks of speech until it understood the sense of what was being communicated, and then relay it in a different language.
Google’s head of translation services Franz Och said: “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.”
Mr Och added: “Clearly for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”
The text translation software already covers 52 of the world’s 6,000 estimated languages. The latest is Haitian Creole.
A customer’s mobile phone would be able to learn its user’s style of talking, but certainly interpreting speech will be a much greater challenge than text.
Google Phone news posted by Marilyn on 09 February 2010
Stock Tickers: GOOG
Comments
Google mobile phone or Esperanto
Although I wish Google well, I can't help feeling that they have bitten off more than they can chew here.
I favour the non-technological solution to overcoming language barriers, namely, wider use of Esperanto. Esperanto is tried and tested. Google's new phone is not.
Comment posted by Bill Chapman on 10/02/2010 21:34:56
Esperanto
Bill Chapman is right.
Why not look long term and have a spoken international language, used on a person-to-person basis. :)
So we seem to be back to Esperanto here. Just have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0
Dr Kvasnak teaches English at Florida Atlantic University.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Comment posted by Anonymous on 12/02/2010 11:54:29
Technological solutions to non-technical problems
Is this really the answer? Or even a good answer?
This sounds to me like yet another case of trying to implement a technological solution to a non-technical problem. It's worth asking whether this is really the right approach.
How well is this going to work trying to chat up a girl in a foreign bar, on a foreign beach or on the bus?
How well is this going to work to negotiate an informal agreement, striking a deal in the corridor, or mutually feeling out one's opposite number around the coffee table?
And how sure can you really be that the technology has conveyed the meaning - let alone connotation and nuance - you wanted to get across?
It should also be considered how well this is - or isn't - going to allow for privacy, in a world where e-mail is already routinely scanned and indexed by both commercial and government entities (including Google itself, and the US and the Chinese governments, just for starters).
Comment posted by Bernardo Verda on 13/02/2010 05:48:25
Re:Technological solutions to non-technical problems
Would you trust this system when negotiating an important business deal, consulting on legal matters, etc?
Perhaps something like Esperanto - which has been around for well over a century and shown to work quite well in practice - deserves a fresh look.
Comment posted by Bernardo Verda on 15/02/2010 13:45:39
Internal mechanism
Can you explain the internal mechanism of this translator?
Comment posted by Anonymous on 20/02/2010 10:21:37
Google smart mobile phones
Google smart mobile is the best mobile phone like Google Nexus.
Comment posted by smithjon on 09/06/2010 06:53:53
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