Google, creator of so many things cool, may have another awesome app in the works. Google is reportedly working on a new voice-to-voice translation that will be available to mobile phones. Meaning if you're stuck in Japan, you'll be able to speak an English phrase into your phone and have it pump out the corresponding Japanese phrase for everyone (or just yourself) to hear. To quote:
“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services. “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."
We like the idea of voice-to-voice translation but we're sure there'll be a lot of kinks and missteps to work out before we get an easy-to-use solution. Google has been working on their speech-to-text engine with the Nexus One so at least Google is taking a step in the right direction. We trust that they can figure it out.
But what'd be insanely cool is if Google voice-to-voice translation could translate an entire conversation in real time. One end speaking English, the other in French. That'd make finding Parisian love a lot easier, that's for sure.
[timesonline via bgr]
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How is this different than the current Google Translate app?
I speak into the phone. It translates what I speak into whatever language I want. It both displays the translated text, and speaks the translated text.
Japanese translation has always been a pain in the ass.. if google can pull that one off then they are truly superior...
I can't wait for my Moto Droid to be a Universal Translator. It will be so handy when the Romulan Empire shows up!