Google by now runs a successful online translator, Google Translate, but they have got far-loftier ideas than simply converting the written word. They desire to translate languages spoken over the phone, as said by their head of translation services.
Speaking to The Times, Mr. Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, said: "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible also work reasonably well in a few years time.
Obviously, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we are working on.
If you gaze at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been enormous progress recently."
It is not really clear as to whether Google wants to translate a phone conversation or conversation around you (for instance, ordering food in a Japanese restaurant). If it is the former, I am unsure as to whether I would actually use the software, although booking hotels in other countries might be one instance.
But then, when the whole thing is done online these days and effective online translation services like Google Translate and Babel Fish exist--Google may find that by the time they launch translation software on a phone, it is too late and everybody can speak English by then anyway. I hope that is not the case, though.
Speaking to The Times, Mr. Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, said: "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible also work reasonably well in a few years time.
Obviously, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we are working on.
If you gaze at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been enormous progress recently."
It is not really clear as to whether Google wants to translate a phone conversation or conversation around you (for instance, ordering food in a Japanese restaurant). If it is the former, I am unsure as to whether I would actually use the software, although booking hotels in other countries might be one instance.
But then, when the whole thing is done online these days and effective online translation services like Google Translate and Babel Fish exist--Google may find that by the time they launch translation software on a phone, it is too late and everybody can speak English by then anyway. I hope that is not the case, though.
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