When it comes to translating between different languages, the golden standard is the Babel fish in Douglas Adams’ book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You stick said fish inside your ear and then it translates, in real time, any language it hears. It also hacks your voice box so that you can speak whatever language the person talking to you is using. We’re quite a few years off until such a device is created, possibly a few hundred years, but that hasn’t stopped the engineers at Google from taking a stab at solving the problem of two people from distant lands failing to understand each other. Google Translate, launched in January 2010 for devices running Google Android, has had an experimental feature whereby two people can place a smartphone between them and then have a conversation in their native languages. The smartphone would act as both a microphone, inputting a language, and a loudspeaker, outputting a translation. It’s only supported English and Spanish … until today that is. We’re happy to say that support for Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian, and Turkish have been added.
When will said feature come to the iOS version? No word. Which version of Android is needed to enjoy the latest version of Google Translate? Android 2.2 Froyo. We hope that at some point in the future that advances in speech to text permeate into other cases. Something like Siri for example, would be great if it was avilable on other platforms and supported a wider range of languages. Not only is it useful for people who might have a difficult time using an input device, but also for people who might be a bit put off by technology in the first place. Who knows, we may soon live in a world where we don’t even carry slabs of glass anymore. Our device will be an earpiece we stick in our head!
[Via: Google Mobile Blog]