Google working on phone speech translation?
Google already has a successful language translation service – but reports suggest it is aiming its sights much higher, working on software that will enable phone users to translate speech in close to real time.
Google: could they create a universal translator?
While the idea of a 'universal translator' has long been a staple of science fiction – from Star Trek to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy – Google apparently believes that the technology is now within reach.
The company is hoping to have the speech-to-speech translation technology ready in 'a few years', Google's head of translations services, Franz Och, said in an interview with The Sunday Times.
'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,' said Och.
Google has also already demonstrated real-time text translation as part of its much-hyped collaboration and communication service Google Wave, which allowed users typing in different languages to communicate with each other.
However, moving from text to speech – with voice recognition technology still not at the stage where it can reliably transcribe phone messages, let alone overlapping two-way conversations – will be a major hurdle.
Google has been making progress in this area, however, with services including the Google Voice phone service, which provides rough text transcripts of voicemail messages, and Google Voice Search, which lets phone users perform Google searches with voice commands.