A Real Live Babel Fish???

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Clik here to view.Yes, science fiction may soon meet fact. Word on the Web is that Google is working on making its own speech-to-speech translation tech for future smartphones. What’s more, the Google people are suggesting this technology could be viable and live within a few years. Think about the implications for international business! I pulled this quote from the article on Gizmodo (link here), which in turned pulled it from an interview with 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.”

If the universal translator of science fiction fame is right around the proverbial corner, could the ever-elusive time teleporter be far behind? Grab your Towel and hang on tight!

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• Google working on smartphone software to automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue (mobilecrunch.com)
• Is Google Building a Star Trek Communicator? (arnoldit.com)

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.