A real-time voice translation is in the works at Google. In the words of Electronisca, here’s the details:
Google on Sunday revealed that it could be the first to enable voice-to-voice translation for phones. Using the existing text conversion and voice recognition its search and from Android, the company is developing a system that could recognize a spoken foreign language and recite it back in the user’s native tongue. It would sort speech into segments and would analyze both the pattern of speech as well as Google’s own translation history to construct a better interpretation.
Google anticipates for their speech-to-speech technology to be ready and working “reasonably well” within a few years. Wired summarizes Google’s goals as follows:
As usual, Google’s goal is loftier: to enable real-time translation of spoken meaning, rather than just words. To do this, the company is cobbling together its voice recognition, 52-language text translation, and text-to-speech technologies into a unified voice-to-voice translator. (Actually, the full path would be “voice-to-text-to-translation-to-voice.”)
Read More on Wired.
While Google translate already enables text translation, speech translation is a more difficult challenge, due to the personal nature of each individual’s accent, voice and pitch. This challenge explains why Google is attempting at voice translation via the mobile phone. Franz Och, head of Google’s translation services comments, ““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.”
If Google succeeds, in spite of their skeptics, then the availability of real time voice translation by could further flatten global markets, and open up phone communication around the world.
Everyone’s talking about Google. Read more about Google’s plans for Voice Translation on TimesOnline, Electronista, and TMCnet.
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