Google Translator is a very helpful service that allows you to put some text in one language and have it translated to another language. This can be done by either copying some words in to a box, or by translating a full webpage in to a different language. However, Google [GOOG] have some bigger goals in that they are now working on translating speech-to-speech, meaning that the service could arrive on a mobile phone in the near future.
When I say the near future, what I mean is it could take a few years to get to the stage where accuracy is good enough to use it as a service at a basic level. The system is broken in to two parts. The first listens to the voice speaking and works out what was said, secondly, good translation is needed to get the right message across to the other language on the other side of the call.
It’s certainly an interesting step forwards and one if they intend to do real-time translation of conversations across languages. Currently the Google Translate service can work with 52 different languages which is increasing over time. The hard part of getting speech to speech working is getting the computer to understand what was said due to different accents used.
More details over at The Times.
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