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Google Improves Android Translator To Battle Siri

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-your-phone-do-the-talking dept.

judgecorp writes "Google Translate for Android, the mobile version of Google's machine translation software, now translates speech back and forth between 14 languages, the company claims. Earlier this year the company added Conversation Mode, which lets users to translate chats between English and Spanish. Now Google has made the tool available from Android 2.2 handsets and later in Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. The arrival of Siri on the iPhone could spark serious competition in translation systems on phones."

29 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Siri and translation by Lord+Satri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Siri doesn't do translations, it's more of an advanced voice recognition tool. Am I wrong? This would mean that at the moment, Apple's Siri and Google Translation would have two different strengths; Siri: usable natural language voice recognition (at least that's how they sell it) and Google Tranlation, well, multi-language translations.

    --
    Animoog.org
    1. Re:Siri and translation by monkeyhybrid · · Score: 5, Informative

      You are correct. I'm sure Siri will gain more functionality in the future but as it stands now, Siri should be compared to Voice Search and other third party voice command apps.

      Google Translate does translate.

      Siri (on iPhone) and Voice Search (on Android) handle voice commands and interaction.

    2. Re:Siri and translation by adamstew · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Siri isn't even just voice recognition. It uses voice recognition as the input for it to perform tasks or lookup trivia type questions for you. Things like "schedule a meeting with my boss tomorrow at 10 about next year's budget". That's all you need to say, and Siri will create a meeting invite in Exchange, inviting my boss for a meeting at 10... it'll title the meeting "Next Year's Budget".

      You can use it for voice dictation... Just about every text input field, now has a microphone that simply lets you say what you were going to type... and the voice recognition is VERY good.

      So while google is using voice recognition, it is using it for two different applications. It's like saying Microsoft Word is competing with Adobe Photoshop because they both use the mouse as an input device. You can't even use Siri for translation. But it wouldn't surprise me if Apple added a similar type of translation feature to Siri... although I doubt it would show up in a conversationalist way... More like "translate 'where is the nearest hospital' in to french".

    3. Re:Siri and translation by brunokummel · · Score: 3, Funny

      ...... Siri: usable natural language voice recognition (at least that's how they sell it) .....

      Japanese people beg to differ... :D

      --
      What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
    4. Re:Siri and translation by Terrasque · · Score: 2

      Well, not that good at getting the gist of it..

      And for those that want to think of Siri as something as good as the average human.. I think most people have no problem figuring out if he meant "Work" or "Home" there...

      --
      It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
    5. Re:Siri and translation by Terrasque · · Score: 5, Informative

      You can use it for voice dictation... Just about every text input field, now has a microphone that simply lets you say what you were going to type... and the voice recognition is VERY good.

      And that have been on Android since v1.6, actually.

      --
      It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
    6. Re:Siri and translation by lpp · · Score: 2

      My understanding (disclaimer: I do not have a 4S, I'm solely relying on reviews) is that Siri handles natural speech much better than the speech recognition found on Android devices. By natural, I mean regular conversational tone and flow, as opposed to the more robotic method where you must. pause. on. each. word. in order to give the translator the chance to note word breaks and parse the sentence structure. So it's not that Siri does it and Android doesn't. It's that Siri seems to do it better, working for the user instead of the user working for the computer.

    7. Re:Siri and translation by Belial6 · · Score: 2

      Trying to talk like a robot and pause between each word will make Android far less accurate in detecting your speech. Google's voice recognition works far better if you speak naturally.

    8. Re:Siri and translation by dogmatixpsych · · Score: 2

      My limited experience with Google's voice recognition on my Android phone is that it is okay but nothing special. Actually, it's far more annoying than just typing what I want. I'll be saying something and it will think I'm done talking and stop listening to me. That's mainly why I haven't used it more - it's so buggy that it's not worth the effort. Maybe it's just my phone or my version of Android (2.2) or my technical ineptitude but voice recognition in Android needs a lot of work to get to where Siri is now.

    9. Re:Siri and translation by blackpig · · Score: 2

      Google does not currently have an equivalent to Siri.

      By "Google" I assume you mean 'Android'?

      Speaktoit has been around for a while.

      Do try to keep up.

  2. Google Improves Android Translator To Battle Siri? by Pieroxy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why the catchy headline "To Battle Siri"? Why wouldn't it be just for "Improving Android Translator"?

    --
    Write boring code, not shiny code!
  3. Re:Yes, that's neat but worthless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nice troll, but version 2.2 of Google Translate for Android is currently available in the standard Android Market on my Verizon Droid2. And if it wasn't, and I really wanted it, I could just download it and install manually. The only thing Verizon holds back is OS revisions, and while it would be nice if they offered some sort of "early adopter" program where you could update before the new version has been certified, it's pretty understandable that they don't just push the updates out to everyone on release day since they have to support it.

  4. Siri doesTranslation? by Grizzley9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does Siri even do translation? Every time I've asked it to translate an English word into Spanish it says it doesn't know what I mean. This is not "battling" Siri at all. Catchy key-word title to get more clicks is what I see.

  5. An app upgrade, not an os upgrade by Comboman · · Score: 2

    Google Translate is an app on Android Marketplace. It is not part of the OS, thus the carrier cannot stop you from upgrading it. Also if you're so bent out of shape about carrier restrictions then buy an unlocked phone like the Nexus S (or root your carrier subsidized phone).

    --
    Support Right To Repair Legislation.
  6. Re:Yes, that's neat but worthless by monkeyhybrid · · Score: 4, Informative

    The app itself is free to download from the android market and will run on any Android device running Andorid 1.5+. That's pretty much everything.

    Conversation mode does appear to require Android 2.2 though, which means it should work on fine on ~85% of Android devices out in the wild.

  7. It's a lot of fun! (ELEVEN!) by SebZero · · Score: 2

    The conversation mode is in alpha and it's intermittently very good or very bad (a complete hoot)!

    I'm bilingual and visited my mother with a, "mum come have a go at this" - 15 minutes later we gave up with tears of laughter at some of the translations.

    Then of course, we tried pieces of the "voice recognition lift" skit which has again come into relevance with the release of siri

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ

  8. Your mother is called. by Jawnn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    She said to tell you to stop being so serious about trivial shit like what one smart phone does and another can't. Oh, she also said to get a life and move out of her basement.

  9. Re:How long until... by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Dangerous times lay ahead when asking your appliances anything about tossed salad.

  10. Except it's not by hellfire · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except Siri doesn't do translation, it does voice command recognition. This is a fail by the editors, picking a submission that deliberately creates an "Apple vs Google" headline to stir up page loads. It's like comparing Google Reader to Apple Mail, it's nonsensical.

    --

    "All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"

  11. Funny thing about this Siri business.... by kervin · · Score: 4, Informative

    First, the article makes no sense since Siri doesn't do translation. I guess translation doesn't "exist" yet since Apple doesn't have a product.

    Google, Nuance and Microsoft have been pushing Speech Recognition for a few years now. These companies put millions into NLP R&D ever year and are on the forefront of technology. Apple had been ignoring this space and so these companies have had great Speech Recognition and other NLP products for a while and Apple doesn't.

    Google and Microsoft are about to release the next wave of speech products ( e.g. in Android 4 and WP 8 ). These companies have NLP technology Apple hasn't even begin to tackle. Like NLP in all major world languages and across many markets ( eg. Checkout EngKoo for example )

    IOS was falling behind and Apple scrambled to purchase a Speech recognition mobile app, quickly licensed Nuance and Wolfram Alpha knowledgebase technology, and added those APIs in the operating system. They had to remove Siri from their market place.

    Marketing mentions DARPA, but just about all Speech R&D is funded in someway by DARPA. DARPA's been carrying that torch for a while now. Even the popular open source Pocket Sphinx was made possible by partial DARPA funding.

    In short this Siri marketing push is the largest scale astroturf marketing campaign I've ever seen.

  12. article translation? by norminator · · Score: 2

    which lets users to translate chats

    Who translated this article?

  13. useless by Blymie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Google's voice search, and translate, and all other speech -> text products are absolutely useless. I find a very, very, very low success rate.

    Good luck if I'm driving in a car too, and the background noise adds to the difficulty.

    I know many other people that are in the same boat, but these are all locals. I wonder if other people think it's just great to have to repeat themselves 10 times, or if others do not have the same issues. I do not believe that local dialects and pronunciation is the issue, the english I hear here, seems to be the same english I might hear on Northern US news reports, on TV stations.

    However, as it sits? Useless!

    1. Re:useless by ergo98 · · Score: 4, Informative

      " I do not believe that local dialects and pronunciation is the issue"

      I have been using the voice input functionality since it came out, and have been shocked at the startling accuracy of it. It is almost never wrong, and is eminently useful for navigation, making calls (by number or by name), or for voice dictation in a message. I use it frequently and it is shockingly rare that it isn't dead on.

      I'm talking about just general voice to text, not about translate which adds another language to language issue, however Google has the voice recognition thing DOWN. I imagine there are some accents and manners of speech that present it difficulty however.

  14. Re:How long until... by lpp · · Score: 2

    "Open the refrigerator doors, HAL."

    "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."

  15. Re:How long until... by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 2

    ... until this tech can correctly translate from Brazilian to English?

    As an example, this sentence in Portuguese:

    "Vamos evitar o uso de papel, gastar papel implica em gastar árvores"

    Google translates as:

    "We avoid the use of paper, wasting paper implies spending trees"

    Here we have some problems of grammar, changed words for no reason and wrong use of future. A more correct translation is*:

    "We will avoid the use of paper, spending paper implies spending trees" br>
    * Note: Is not a "exact" translation. English is too simple to pass the same idea in the same way as using Portuguese.

    --
    Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
  16. I'm looking forward to the day... by mswhippingboy · · Score: 3, Funny
    I'm looking forward to the day when both iOS and Android devices both have continuous speech recognition tied to chatter-bot apps so that we can just sit back and watch them argue amongst themselves about which is better, thereby saving ./ 80% of the conversion space.

    Then we can focus on something really important like who was more influential - Dennis Ritchie or Steve Jobs....

    --
    Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
  17. Re:How long until... by macs4all · · Score: 2

    "Open the refrigerator doors, HAL."

    "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."

    Wow! A great new diet aid product!

    Appliances with "Diet Mode"!

  18. Google Translate by mswhippingboy · · Score: 2
    As an aside and part of the Stanford introduction to AI course, Peter Norvig discusses some technical aspects of how Google translate works under the covers. Pretty interesting for the nerds among us...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sPSN0aI0PgE

    --
    Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
  19. Re:How long until... by Pope · · Score: 2

    Except "spending paper" isn't an English phrase, so "wasting paper" is the better idiom.

    --
    It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.