Google Working On Speech Translation for Phones
Remember the original Babel Fish? Or those translator microbes in Farscape? Now Google is working on bringing near real-time speech translation...to phones.
Remember the original Babel Fish inHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Drop one in your ear and you can instantly understand any language you hear? Or the translator microbes inFarscape that “colonized the base of the brain” and let diverse species more-or-less understand each other’s speech? OrStar Trek’s universal translator? Mostly these were fantastical inventions to save writers (and actors) (and audiences!) the trouble of conceiving and speaking whole new languages…thus making their work more accessible and commercially viable. But now comes word Internet giant Google is working on just such a technology, aimed at near real-time translation of speech—into speech!
According to a report inThe Times, Google is hoping to wed the speech recognition technology it has already developed to enable speech commands for its mobile services with computerized language translation to enable users to speak into a phone using their native language, then have their speech recognized, translated, and “spoken” back over the phone using a machine-generated voice. According to the piece, the software would work much like a professional human interpreter, analyzing speech in chunks or packages so the meaning of individual words becomes clear from context, then translating the whole meaning.
According to Franz Och, the head of Google’s translation services interviewed in the article, accurate speech recognition remains a sticky problem because of the sheer variety of human voices and accents, but mobile phones might give an edge to the technology because, by definition, they’re highly personal and therefore can theoretically adapt to individual users over time and get a feel for their voices and idioms. The increasing processing power available in phones is also a help: Google’s Nexus One ships with one of the fastest mobile processors available on the market, and the amount of CPU power and memory available to phones is only going to increase.
Google doesn’t anticipate having anything ready to go in the short term, but Ochs speculated that in a few years’ time speech-to-speech translation could be working “reasonably well.”
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By: Brian_Barker
February 9, 2010 @ 4:42 AM
Google's “Babel Fish” translator will in never solve the language problem. Not only does it discriminate against anyone who cannot afford a mobile phone, but against minority language groups as well.
There are 6,800 languages worldwide, not fifty-two !
Moreover, if I met a native in Borneo, and he said to me in Hakka “I've lost my mobile phone” how would I understand him :)
And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !
As English loses its economic power, the answer is not for us to move to Mandarin Chinese, but to Esperanto which puts all speakers on an equal footing.
Have a look at http://www.lernu.net or http://www.esperanto.net
By: Brian_Barker
February 9, 2010 @ 4:42 AM
Google's “Babel Fish” translator will in never solve the language problem. Not only does it discriminate against anyone who cannot afford a mobile phone, but against minority language groups as well.
There are 6,800 languages worldwide, not fifty-two !
Moreover, if I met a native in Borneo, and he said to me in Hakka “I've lost my mobile phone” how would I understand him :)
And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !
As English loses its economic power, the answer is not for us to move to Mandarin Chinese, but to Esperanto which puts all speakers on an equal footing.
Have a look at http://www.lernu.net or http://www.esperanto.net
By: Brian_Barker
February 9, 2010 @ 4:42 AM
Google's “Babel Fish” translator will in never solve the language problem. Not only does it discriminate against anyone who cannot afford a mobile phone, but against minority language groups as well.
There are 6,800 languages worldwide, not fifty-two !
Moreover, if I met a native in Borneo, and he said to me in Hakka “I've lost my mobile phone” how would I understand him :)
And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !
As English loses its economic power, the answer is not for us to move to Mandarin Chinese, but to Esperanto which puts all speakers on an equal footing.
Have a look at http://www.lernu.net or http://www.esperanto.net
By: King George
February 9, 2010 @ 12:57 PM
“And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !” and how many fat Americans want to talk to starving Africans? (hint: answer is 0), you are the typical idiotic internet loser.
By: King George
February 9, 2010 @ 12:57 PM
“And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !” and how many fat Americans want to talk to starving Africans? (hint: answer is 0), you are the typical idiotic internet loser.
By: King George
February 9, 2010 @ 12:57 PM
“And how many starving Africans can afford a mobile phone !” and how many fat Americans want to talk to starving Africans? (hint: answer is 0), you are the typical idiotic internet loser.
By: Brian_Barker
February 10, 2010 @ 1:09 AM
I agree. Not many fat Americans worry about starving Africans. Probably because of their isolationist attidudes !
I wished however to point out that the solution to the language problem will need a new international language when the power of English “language imperialism” fades. We need to move to non-isolationist, non-national language, rather than Mandarin Chinese. Why then dismiss the potential of Esperanto as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0
Good luck to Babel Fish, but we need to look long-term as well
By: Brian_Barker
February 10, 2010 @ 1:09 AM
I agree. Not many fat Americans worry about starving Africans. Probably because of their isolationist attidudes !
I wished however to point out that the solution to the language problem will need a new international language when the power of English “language imperialism” fades. We need to move to non-isolationist, non-national language, rather than Mandarin Chinese. Why then dismiss the potential of Esperanto as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0
Good luck to Babel Fish, but we need to look long-term as well
By: Brian_Barker
February 10, 2010 @ 1:09 AM
I agree. Not many fat Americans worry about starving Africans. Probably because of their isolationist attidudes !
I wished however to point out that the solution to the language problem will need a new international language when the power of English “language imperialism” fades. We need to move to non-isolationist, non-national language, rather than Mandarin Chinese. Why then dismiss the potential of Esperanto as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0
Good luck to Babel Fish, but we need to look long-term as well
By: çeviri
March 2, 2010 @ 5:34 AM
Google Translate between English, French, German, Spanish is absolutely amazingly good. The reason why those translations are now very good is because Google has enormous amounts of professionally translated texts from the European Union and the United Nations, where by just adding more and more examples to Google's database, the translations become better and better.
By: ingilizce çeviri
May 5, 2010 @ 1:19 AM
Translation software has come a long way in the last few years so I'm not surprised to hear about this. Between some languages it might actually work reasonably soon.