Slashdot Mirror
Google Shooting For Smartphone Universal Translator
nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on 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."
Maybe my experience is atypical, but Google doesn't seem to translate pages very well. I can only imagine how bad it will be having a phone do this. "Did that guy's phone just call me what I think it did?"
Or you could just stick this Babel fish in your ear.
Translation software sucks hard, even under simple phrases. Why do it on a cellphone on a large scale?
~The roAm
...this is a recipe for universal worldwide hilarity.
Caution: not for use with Hungarian Tobacconists.
My phone has Android. It's very neat but, not terribly practical. It includes voice dialing and voice Google search. It is slow, taking several seconds to record, upload and translate the voice to text. Then of course, you have to do it all over again because it completely botched the interpretation. Result: Time wasted!
Now they want to do language translation as well? They can't even get a single language right and they want to do multiple languages? Even their existing Language tools page is very neat and often handy but, the results are typically very dodgy.
The fantasies of Star Trek universal translators are still WAY off.
Maybe this technology will make dealing with call centers in India somewhat bearable. Perhaps it'll be capable of converting their dialect of "English" into something that the rest of the English-speaking world can understand.
Then again, this translation technology probably can't do a damn thing about their general lack of knowledge. Shucks.
Does anyone use voice recognition software? Here are a couple of my voicemails transcribed by Google Voice:
Hey man, Hello, this is gonna ask you about Stockton uncle in a missed your call, so, so give well. Okay bye.
Hey it's me and I for me. Long, My of the day. So Hey Jared, Here doing. If you come for another anti, gimme a call before you go to sleep and stuff, so give me a favor you familiar with it. I love you bye.
Whale
Sure, these will be handheld. But in the future, they'll be directly injected into you by a DRD.
with everyone else... Google isn't great at translating and sadly it's pretty much the best. I speak a myriad of languages and Google only does well with Latin based langs and only if they are grammatically perfect. :)
You could always figure it out by context but when you get to German or Russian, then you're in trouble. Hell, imagine Mandarin/Cantonese? Pretty soon though, everyone will be able to understand everyone else and I won't be as cool anymore
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
I hope they succeed.
Tablespoons, by an Apple Newton
or [allegedly] what happens when you run Jabberwocky through a handwriting recognition program.... :-)
-----------
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.
'Beware the tablespoon my son,
The jaws that bite, the Claus that catch.
Beware the Subjects bird, and shred
The serious Bandwidth!'
He took his Verbal sword in hand:
Long time the monitors fog he sought,
So rested he by the Tumbled tree,
Long time the monitors fog he sought,
And as in selfish thought he stood,
The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
Came stifling through the trigger wood,
And troubled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through,
The Verbal blade went thicker shade.
He left it dead, and with its head,
He went gambling back.
'And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
Come to my arms my bearish boy.
Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!'
He charted in his joy.
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"Shaka, when the walls fell"
Google's voice recognition software combined with Google's translation software. I predict this will cause World War III within hours of going live.
Like a f#@%ing deflector dish, then we can solve all the world's problems by reversing the polarity once it's constructed.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Lets hope it works a bit better than their browser translator, I always bet an error!
Can you imagine the possibilities? Unleash this thing at the UN. World War III started on a google phone with the mistranslation: "It was lovely eating your daughter".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Ooh riskee very risky!
No doubt Google will try and fail, while Apple will try and succeed. They are just that good.
Make it so!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
As long as people use it to improve their understanding and not to officially communicate with others, I have no problem with that. It can be somewhat offensive to receive papers that are badly translated. If you want to communicate or sell me something, at least try to learn my language instead of faking it with computer translators. You should see the ridiculous English to French translations sometimes...
The lack of interest in learning other languages can and will lead to embarrassing situations...
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/02/2148231&from=rss
Of Google Planets
Google Universal Translate - Offending colleagues in their own language faster and with more energy!
[From the rocket ranch] I await your instructions sir.
a) [From HQ] Don't fire the missiles!
or
b) [From HQ] Don't. Fire the missiles!
What could possibly go wrong?
The problem with voice recognition is inherently a user related problem. All this fluid/casual conversation, regional dialects, muffled voices, uneven, laxidasical cadences not to mention you kids and your fads and lexicon of so-called 'lingo'. If everyone just spoke like robots there'd be no problems. Humph!
Quack, quack.
"Gorbachev Sings! Tractor! Buttocks!"
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Well, this is great. This was something that I submitted to their power of 10 contest over a year ago. Seems they just used "contest" that to get good ideas to further their bottom line. My platform was the smartphones as the processor plus additional items.
"Do no Evil"..... Rolls eyes
Thanks for ripping me off Google.
translated to arabic, korean, spanish and back:
I play back and forth between languages. In Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, or in some cases, back, back and still needs some work to do.
The problem is primarily things like diction. You can "train" someone sitting in front of a computer to speak slowly and clearly with good diction. Fine.
The problem is the most useful use model for a cell phone translator would be getting a cab or walking into a store. You talk into your phone and it says something to the other person in their language - wonderful, because you have "trained" yourself to speak clearly and slowly with good diction.
Then the other person mumbles something back at you in their language that neither you or the cell phone can make heads or tails out of. You can't "train" them so it will never work for that.
From my limited experience, English has its share of strange accents and such but in large measure people can speak with good diction and pronounciation. Lots of non-English languages seem to promote far less clarity and human-to-human it doesn't really impair communication that much. Human-to-machine is a whole different story and we are very far away from being able to do speech recognition with poor pronounciation and poor diction.
Sure, this has its limitations. We're not going to be conducting diplomacy with aliens on the deck of the starship enterprise using cell phone machine translation. But for simple and easy to understand things like "Where is the bathroom?" or "The cheese is old and moldy" this thing will be sufficient, I'm sure.
There is also an art to using machine translation. I don't know how to describe it, but if you input things like you'd imagine a foreigner saying them, the translation will be much better. Your input can't be the way you actually talk, it has to be more like the statements you would find in a children's book - and each thought should be contained in its own sentence.
or else!
Stephen Fry offers...
"Hi, Stephen, it’s Natasha from BBC Newsnight in London. Just to say I’ve sent you two texts. One is to say that we could do it at eleven am your time after the launch, or any time sooner after the launch, or we could do it at midday as we suggested earlier. I, er, if you could text me back about that, and I’ve sent you the details of Skype that you need to do too. If you could give me a call back. Enjoy the launch and I’ll speak to you after that. Thank you Bye."
I’ve transcribed it from the voicemail sound file that resides online on my inbox on the Google Voice site. All fine. I have also ticked the option for Google Voice to send me a text transcript of any voicemail. Below is their interpretation of Natasha’s message it’s rather endearing how hopelessly wrong the largest company on earth gets it.
"Hi Stephen. It’s Jeff from BBC needs in nuns. And just to say I sent 80 tax, one, if to say we could do it. I left in i a m your time off to go into any time soon, or the court and full we could grab me today as we suggested at. A. F. I. If you could text me back byebye. I’ve sent you the details of skylights that you need to 3 T if you could give me a call. Bye. Enjoy the loans. I’ll speak to you after that. Thank you. Bye"
On a more serious note, such transcripts at least allow you to get an idea of the rough content and tone of a message without having to stop and listen to it, a much more concentration-intensive task.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
And often to remote areas of several speakers to visit my mother tongue. My time to learning for all the world to me. This application can really be deadly for me. I can only look at the data in small villages in Africa, when he began to speak in English and Portuguese damage my phone to imagine. I hope that the address does not require a network connection.
It does universal translation and then some!
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
There are lots of smart people here on /.
/.
Smart people all think they are smarter than everyone else.
Google has more money than anyone here on
Google has already hired so many smart people (I mean REALLY SMART!!!) that if any company can make this work, it will be Google.
Let's see it happen before all of the smart people put them down. BTW...have you seen the translator on Google Wave. Its simply that with a vox.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
This seems like something that the NSA is probably salivating over. Imagine being able to translate intercepts in near real time with accurate voice recognition. I'm sure they already have imagined it. That technology is nothing short of a Manhattan Project for the SIGINT community.
There are companies who have translators available on the phone. You call them, tell them what you want to say and they can talk to the other person. I don't recall it costing too much.
Deleted
A better example would be say Dutch. Translate the OP from English to Dutch and back to English (i.e. a worst case scenario), and you end up with this:
"The company has an automatic system for translating texts on computers, sweetened by scanning millions of multilingual websites and documents. Until now includes 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google has a system telephone speech recognition that allows users to query websites by speaking commands into their phones instead of typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to software to understand voice of a caller and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language to produce. "
This is perfectly legible to me, and vastly better than what you got when babelfish was introduced 11 years ago. There is a good TechTalk about the topic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PzPDRPwlA which should be required viewing before making fun of google's machine translation efforts.
Voice recognition is harder, but for continuous untrained speech recognition google voice is pretty cool - I've gotten some barely intelligible voice messages on my google voice number, and where google voice is sure (i.e. black text) it is 95%+ correct, where it is not sure it is maybe 30% correct, but for another 30% it is not possible to figure out what was said, except when taking context into consideration. Google Voice transcribing a call from a mobile phone is better than what you got with Dragon Dictate 5 years ago even with a good microphone, so it is not unlikely that in a few years it will be better than naive human transcription. Humans will be better at guessing based on context thought.
Basically, in 5 years the kind of system google is talking about will work good enough to successfully flirt with a french girl (see http://www.youtube.com/user/searchstories) :P
[*] This is why you should always bring a mobile phone, and have the number for the place you're going.
for the low price of $5 first minute and $2 each additional minute.
... a partially telepathic device, rather than a pure computer program? (And invented by Spock's mother - a scientist who ended up marrying a high-ranking (and of course telepathic) Vulcan she encountered during her research?)
I THINK that was cannon rather than fan fiction...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This would be great if all calls are translated and spoken by a sexy female voice!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
Silly! This is Google.
After the translation, you'll hear advertising based upon what was said.
Person Using Translator: Excuse me, where is the bathroom?
Phone in local Language: Excuse me, where is the bathroom?
Local Person (in local language): Down that hall, third door on your left.
Phone in Person's Language: Down that hall, third door on your left. By the way, One Week Bath will build your dream bathroom in one week, guaranteed! Visit www.OneWeekBath.com today!
There's already a phone that does this: The Pomegranate (http://www.pomegranatephone.com/).
"Somebody set us up the bomb?" This does not bode well....
Voice translation works great, I'm using it now!
Why a little bit earlier, I was dictating a letter to my set double the killer.
ahh, darn it anyhow, the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten as we say.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
English:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
to Spanish:
Cuando en el curso de los acontecimientos humanos se hace necesario para un pueblo disolver los lazos políticos que lo han ligado a otro y tomar entre las naciones de la tierra el puesto separado e igual a que las leyes de la Naturaleza y de la Naturaleza Dios les dan derecho, un justo respeto a las opiniones de la humanidad exige que declare las causas que lo impulsan a la separación.
to German:
Wenn im Verlauf der menschlichen Geschichte wird es für ein Volk auflösen, um die politischen Bande, die sie mit einem anderen verbunden zu haben und unter den Völkern der Erde die gesonderte und gleiche Station übernehmen, die erforderlich sind, um die Gesetze der Natur und der Gott der Natur haben sie Anspruch, ein menschenwürdiges Bezug auf die Meinungen der Menschen verlangt, dass sie die Ursachen, die sie zur Trennung getrieben wird.
to Czech:
Kdy se v prbhu lidských djin, bude to rozptýlí pro národ politické svazky, které je spojené s jiným a pevzít mezi národy zem, oddlené a stejné stanici, je nutné, aby zákony pírody a Bh pírody mu, pokud jde o sluné názory lidstva vyaduje, aby byly píiny, které jsou pohánny oddlit.
To Russian:
[slashdot does not accept]
To Italian:
Quando, nel corso della storia umana, si dissiperà connessioni politiche della nazione, che è collegato a un altro e prendere tra le nazioni della terra, separato e parità di stazione, è necessario che le leggi della natura e il Dio della natura, dal punto di vista le opinioni dignitose del genere umano prevede che, per ragioni che portare ad ulteriori separatamente.
To Yiddish:
[Slashdot does not accept]
To English again:
When in the course of human history, it will Dissipate the nation's political Connections, which is connected to others and take between the Nations of the earth, the separate and equal station, "it is necessary that the Laws of nature and the God of nature, from the point spectacle of the Latvian Opinion of humanity Requires that for reasons which lead to further Separately.
Better job than I expected it to do.
So... do we stick this into the left ear or the right?
If there were something like Google Translate is the recipe for the world's universal hilarity.
Back at JavaOne a few years ago there was a presentation entitled "Universal Translator - Bridging the Communications Barrier with JSAPI". (http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2008/pdf/TS-5908.pdf) Not only did the presenter show that it could be done, he demonstrated a simple system that did the translations into multiple languages simultaneously.
Mandate the USA networks be broadcast worldwide, on every televisoring system. Non-WorldEnglish speakers would be eliminated at the rate of 146K per day, due to death.
I like learning things, I enjoy it. But I hate learning useless things or things which quickly become useless. I spent a huge amount of energy learning how to use and support Novell NetWare and taking all their vendor cert exams. Then in almost no time that skillset became valueless so I did it all over again with Microsoft NT4. Then guess what happened to that too. It was all pretty frustrating so I decided to start learning a new language. So far it's going great. Google better not burn me on this one too.
I didn't read the GP, but I noticed the first line "In Chinese, then back to English" and decided to deliberately not read the GP until after reading the translation. I am seriously impressed. Especially since it was English/Chinese/English, both notoriously difficult languages for the non-native speaker.
Google's done an excellent job.