Google Making Language Translation Phone
Stick it in your ear.
It wasn't too long ago that using online translator services such as Google Translate or AltaVista's Babel Fish seemed like the magic that would erase language barriers across the internet. Now Google is working on a new software that could translate voice input nearly instantly – as if sticking a Babel Fish into your ear.
Google already has a working text-to-text translation service as well a voice recognition system it uses for its phone software, including Google Voice.
"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, in a Times Online story. "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."
The challenge now, besides reducing the lag between input and output, is improving accuracy of voice recognition. After all, the spoken word has more opportunities of variation compared to text.
"Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch. 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," said Och. "The more data we input, the better the quality."
Do you think a real-world Babel Fish could eventually take away the need for people to learn multiple languages?
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Looks interesting, but I wont be using it.
Cause you're probably stuck in Hickville for life, Jim Bob! Not all people around the world know how to speak english.
No more foreign language classes? haha
Either way, the world needs to have one official language. Chinese, German, English, idc.
Oh man I'm laughing thinking about having something in my ear that is translating say Spanish and it makes as many mistakes as the Google Voice voicemail to text translater does. "Wait, what? You want dried papaya vytek?"
Cool thought. A lot of work to do.
wow, this would be HUGE. Imagine being able to communicate anywhere you go.
For example... I goto Mexico on vacation and only know a few words in Spanish. LOL Call the waiter and he can hear in Spanish what you want. Yah it seems retarded but seriously if you HAD to communicate in another language it would be a easy solution.
I could finally order something other then cerveza
No more foreign language classes? hahaEither way, the world needs to have one official language. Chinese, German, English, idc.
Let's just put aside the "how" argument here and I'll simply ask, why? Why does the world need one official language?
Let's just put aside the "how" argument here and I'll simply ask, why? Why does the world need one official language?
So humans can finally understand each other. Would we need to have huge wars against another country, if the people of both countries can understand what is going on? I think it would be easier to just sit down and talk. That's just my opinion though, maybe it's best that we alienate ourselves from... ourselves?
Would be pretty awesome to have a universal translator like in star trek. Now everyone can speak english!
Google will have to work on their translations though. People of different regions sometimes have "sayings" that lose meaning when translated or can cause misunderstandings.
Um, doubt this will work all that well, especially when the grammar of two languages is significantly different. Take Japanese for instance, when using Japanese, subject comes first (and is often omitted after first use) followed by any objects and verb is last, where as English is subject verb then object. I have great doubts that this will work all that well. I think the technology is still far off. I mean just try using google page translator, it is still seriously lacking in the accuracy department.
Yet another way google can cram their ubiquitous advertising down the throats of people.
Wouldn't be surprised if they secretly "listen" to the conversation and if the users also should be using google app. - gmail, goggle docs what have you...they will subtle show adverts targeted these users..
/facepalm
Language is most certainly not the cause of modern wars. Maybe back in the day, but not in the last several hundred years for sure.
The incorrect assumption you make is that all human beings are generaly decent and willing to talk it out. Their not. A great many of them are greedy and willing to kill to make their pile of stuff bigger.
this seems good, but man our childrens need to learn new languages, i dont think this is gonna let them, i mean almost every kid has a phone!
Universal translators are only a few years away? That would be pretty awesome, i just hope it doesnt sound like a robot is speaking to you once its translated on the other end of the call.
Whatever you do, dont say "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle" while using one of these Babel phones!
This is great. Now rich people can order their illegal immigrant maids around by calling them up on their cell phones.
Sometimes the online translations do not work very well. Sometimes the translations are funny. I would expect voice translation to exhibit the same problems.
I'm less than enthusiastic about this approach, although I'm down with technology. This is nothing else than an excuse for people to stop learning foreign languages.
My first gripe is that machine translation more often than not contains tons of errors. Even when it gets right, something is still missing. You lose human touch, sense and soul.
The next thing that worries me is that this is just another thing that would make your brain go numb. When you take away the stimuli, that's when your brain loses interest and there goes intelligence down the drain.
Secondly, we are becoming nothing more than couch potatoes, with machines doing the working, the speaking, the entertainment and whatnot. Ultimately, machines will realize that we're actually the weak link and will start doing the "living" for us as well.
Why do I suddenly envision huge Chinese telemarketing farms using this technology to allow millions of non-English speaking cheap employees to bombard us with advertisements for penal enlargement remedies? Seriously, we all know this will happen...
"Do you think a real-world Babel Fish could eventually take away the need for people to learn multiple languages?"
Since a babel fish is an animal feeding off of brainwaves it's highly unlikely that this bbc brainchild will ever become a reality. BUT I suppose with enough processing power a realtime translation system would actually work reliably enough for everyday use. I would still use carbon based translators for politics and other situation where incorrect translations can have severe consequences.
Translation of the typed text is sooo far from "ok". Voice recognition is sooo "if there is additional noise, existing algorithms will break". Yet mega-cool creator of the "Chrome OS" (web browser in BIOS thingy is available for years now, mind you) wants to be even mega-cooler and starts to solve 2 unsolved problems at a time, heck it's even 3, you not only need to develop sophisticated algorithms, but they also must be fast enough, to allow on the fly translatoin.
Sigh...
So humans can finally understand each other. Would we need to have huge wars against another country, if the people of both countries can understand what is going on? I think it would be easier to just sit down and talk. That's just my opinion though, maybe it's best that we alienate ourselves from... ourselves?
BTW, language barrier is a lame excuse to go to war, and it has never been the case. Wars are idiotic on their own, they don't need any "excuses".
I'm less than enthusiastic about this approach, although I'm down with technology. This is nothing else than an excuse for people to stop learning foreign languages.My first gripe is that machine translation more often than not contains tons of errors. Even when it gets right, something is still missing. You lose human touch, sense and soul.The next thing that worries me is that this is just another thing that would make your brain go numb. When you take away the stimuli, that's when your brain loses interest and there goes intelligence down the drain.Secondly, we are becoming nothing more than couch potatoes, with machines doing the working, the speaking, the entertainment and whatnot. Ultimately, machines will realize that we're actually the weak link and will start doing the "living" for us as well.
You also lose the opportunity to learn about the culture of the country of whose language you are learning (though for some people, culture is the thing that yoghurt has).
Also, when you go overseas people are far more appreciative when you speak their language. You get better service, etc (not to mention far easier to pick up the local girls)
OK on languages... I live in The Netherlands. A traditional trade country. Most people know how to speak English, German, and occasionally French. That being said, the majority of us Dutch adults feels most confident speaking our native language, Dutch. But we know how to communicate abroad.
Knowing the most spoken languages on this planet (English, Portugese, French and Mandarin) one should be able to cope quite well, especially if everyone around the globe learned these languages. Or we could use Google's new invention.
I for one am looking forward to it.
Do you think a real-world Babel Fish could eventually take away the need for people to learn multiple languages?
No because they need to be debugged! Again and again.
Language is a slow-moving target, even if it's slow-moving. It's still moving. Not mentioning that current translations contain tons of errors.
OpenOffice has no default sophisticated grammar checker. Which shows the lack of incentives/interest in those basic things. There doesn't seem to be interest in having a system that can do word/sentence hierarchy-aided text translation. (That would detect words context/meanings because some words in other languages have other meanings. This means that he translation device has a instance of the whole conversation to work in. ) Or action-mapped text-translation. (Where translation is mapped to actions and those actions translated to the other language. And we need other nifty/sophisticated features in place. But they are too low in the stack to be interesting. (They're basic functions/sophisticated. Other words boring and difficult. So not much progress there.
Anyway, there is the Simon Listens url:
http://simon-listens.org/index.php?id=122&L=1