Google Translation Phone

Let us begin with a hopeful model by Google which cannot come to fruition soon enough! As I'm sure you all know, Google had been working on a phone typically dubbed Google Phone...what many people don't seem to realize however is that this phone was officially called Nexus One and Google is in fact working on numerous phones!

Here I am focusing on one such model and the impact it can have on the whole world!

I'm sure all of us have used Google Translation in the past - if you haven't then check it out at Google Translate

Naturally this is a very ambitious service and it is quite literally filled with bugs...that said, it is also one-of-a-kind (not including competitors like BabelFish which are great too!) and can be really handy indeed

Now imagine if you could use this technology on-the-go...all of a sudden it has a lot more uses right? Now imagine if you could not only use it on-the-go but you could all use it to convert Speech - and not just Text...ahh now that would be fantastic, wouldn't it?

Well apparently that's what we'll be getting soon according to The Times as Google is working on a Translation Phone which will quite literally be able to convert all our spoken words into various languages

Can you imagine its various uses? You could use it to communicate with people who can't speak the same language...you could use it to solve various accent issues, you could use it to order food from local shops...really the uses are endless...in fact, even if the technology is somewhat bugged (like Google Translation currently is)...it can still be incredibly useful simply as an educational device if nothing else...and of course, if it can repeat the converted Speech back to you then that's just an icing on the cake...

Anyways here's the actual Article:

"GOOGLE is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages.

The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week.

Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in.

Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language. Like a professional human interpreter, the phone would analyse “packages” of speech, listening to the speaker until it understands the full meaning of words and phrases, before attempting translation.

“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.

“If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.”

Although automatic text translators are now reasonably effective, voice recognition has proved more challenging.

“Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch,” said Och. “But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you. The phone should get a feel for your voice from past voice search queries, for example.”

The translation software is likely to become more accurate the more it is used. And while some translation systems use crude rules based on the grammar of languages, Google is exploiting its vast database of websites and translated documents to improve the accuracy of its system.

“The more data we input, the better the quality,” said Och. There is no shortage of help. “There are a lot of language enthusiasts out there,” he said.

However, some experts believe the hurdles to live translation remain high. David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said: “The problem with speech recognition is the variability in accents. No system at the moment can handle that properly.

“Maybe Google will be able to get there faster than everyone else, but I think it’s unlikely we’ll have a speech device in the next few years that could handle high-speed Glaswegian slang.

“The future, though, looks very interesting. If you have a Babel Fish, the need to learn foreign languages is removed.”

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the small, yellow Babel Fish was capable of translating any language when placed in the ear. It sparked a bloody war because everyone became able to understand what other people were saying."

So what do you think? Do you think this will succeed or is the technology not good enough for this to be of any use? Or perhaps you don't even think this is actually of any use... whatever your opinion, do let us know by posting in the comments section below

Thanks!