Google announces smartphone translator software

Richard Goodwin

Search, and now mobile giant, Google has announced that it is developing new translator software that will be able to hear and translate speech instantly.

Google’s proposed translation software would utilise its text translation software and voice recognition, which is appearing in Google smartphones already, to decode language from one to another, say from Spanish to English.

At present, the software is only very basic working on small segments of speech. However, Google believes it will soon be refined to the point where it could be used by many users’ to analyse complex speech.

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.”

He added: “ 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.”