Developers at Google are working on the first phone able to translate foreign languages almost instantly.
Using voice recognition and automatic translation technologies, it could potentially transform the way people communicate around the world by bringing down language barriers. Google are forecasting that they’ll have a basic system ready within a couple of years.
Having already created an automatic text-translation system computers, Google has also developed a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. It is hoped that 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.
“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,” he said.
