X
Tech

Google Translate for iPhone has lots of potential

Google recently launched a new translation tool for iPhone that turns your device into a free (plus data costs) and very good pocket translator. That got me thinking though -- Google has the technology, and ability to make this application far better than any other pocket translator, and a lot more useful than it is already.
Written by Garett Rogers, Inactive

Google recently launched a new translation tool for iPhone that turns your device into a free (plus data costs) and very good pocket translator. That got me thinking though -- Google has the technology, and ability to make this application far better than any other pocket translator, and a lot more useful than it is already.

[image from Google]

It's no secret that Google launched 1-800-GOOG-411 to build their speech recognition capability. In fact, they have already implemented the fruits of their trained speech recognition engine in YouTube for political videos -- but why does it have to stop there? Imagine being able to speak a phrase in English, and have it automatically translate it for you rather than having to type it? It could work the other way around too -- when translating into languages with completely different character sets, why not have it speak it for you? Down the road, perhaps it wold be interesting to have your device listen to a conversation and provide real-time conversation logs in the language of your choice.

Mobile translation devices have the ability to change, and significantly improve the way we communicate with each other. Mind you, machine translation is far from perfect, but it's getting better, and if anyone can create a way to make every language 100% understandable by everyone, it will be Google.

If executed properly, Google Translate for mobile devices could very well become the non-fiction version of a babel fish.

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-ike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy absorbing unconscious frequencies and excreting a matrix of conscious frequencies to the speech centres of the brain. the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you instantly understand anything said to you in any language. -- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Editorial standards