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?"
"Shaka, when the walls fell"
It's "hovercraft". My telephone is full of hovercraft.