If you thought the Google Translate app made you think you were living in the future, you should check out what we stumbled upon at the NTT Docomo booth at Mobile World Congress 2011. The Japanese carrier was showing off a prototype service that dive live translating on phone calls.
The live translating service was just a prototype but it was running over 3G and could translate Japanese-to-English and English-to-Japanese on the fly. The user would speak one langue on one end, it would come through on the other as the original sound and also in text and then a second or so later a text version of what they said would appear.
As you can see from the video below, there’s a slight lag between the translating but that’s to be expected I suppose. Let’s also not forget that this is a prototype that is running off 3G, so a finalized version using 4G LTE could be faster with less latency.
So, when can we expect this live translating service to hit the markets of Japan and beyond? Well, the representatives were being coy and couldn’t even give me a ballpark time frame. Additionally, Japan has historically been called the “Galapagos” of the cell phone market because all the cool, innovative stuff that happens in its cell phone market rarely leaves its shores. Stefan had a good rant about that.
Still, the demonstration shows that this type of live translating service is feasible with existing technology. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google working on this in conjunction with the carriers, as it really would be useful. Just imagine all the new business opportunities that a working, live translating service would offer.
I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff here at Mobile World Congress 2011 (check out our full coverage here) but this is definitely one of the coolest.