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Google developing real-time translator phone
Google has confirmed that it is working on a technology to allow real-time language translation on the phone.
The software would integrate voice recognition and the company's Google Translate facility.
The company reckons it could have a working product within two years - so there's no need to fork out for those Mandarin lessons any longer.
"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," Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, told The Times.
"If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently."
Google Translate already handles 52 languages, and Google will be able to take advantage of its massive archive of translated material to continually improve accuracy. And because phones are generally used by only one person, voice recognition software would be able to adapt to the user's accent and intonation.
Various companies and academics have been working for years to develop something like this. Carnegie-Mellon University has been beavering away for three years now, and NEC recently announced plans to launch spectacles that allow voice-to-text translation.
QQ (not verified)
Great that they are working on it...! Now, hope it gives better results than the text to text translation.
freeman70 (not verified)
I am not sure about other languages but it will never be able to translate Chinese in real time simultaneously because of differences in grammar. As a non-native Chinese language speaker, even a simple sentence like I went to school
yesterday is spoken in Chinese as 我昨天去å¸校 ( I, yesterday, go school). Therefore to translate in real time, the computer still has to wait for the last English word to be spoken before it can start translating. This is why so many Chinese people
have difficulty understanding complex English sentences. They want to translate every word into Chinese and end up missing some important information along the way.
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