Google working on speech translation for phones

Posted by Adam Bunker on Mon 8 Feb 2010

'Babel Fish' translator could be major plus for Android

'Babel fish' simultaneous language translation on phones could be here very soon according to Google.

The search giant already offers a online text translator and voice recognition software but combining the two by translating languages over a phone would be a potentially mind-boggling historic advance.

Think the Babel Fish in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the need never to learn foreign languages.

The feature could also become a major selling point for the Android mobile phone operating system.

Speaking to the Times, Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, said:

"We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time.

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.

If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently."

He added that, just as the Google search engine learns user patterns, the next generation of phones could start to learn voice patterns, thereby making existing problems concerning pitch and accents largely irrelevant.

Link: Times Online