Documenting the Coming Singularity

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Automatic, instant voice translation in 2 years, via Google

TimesOnline - 2.7.10 (by Chris Gourlay)

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.

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1 comments :

Brian Barker said...

Why not look long term and have a spoken international language, used on a person-to-person basis :)

We seem to be back to Esperanto here. Just have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0

Dr Kvasnak teaches English at Florida Atlantic University.

A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net