Google is working on real-time phone conversation translation

According to some news, Google is planing to incorporate real-time translation of people’s phone conversations into the Android platform. This would allow two people to speak with each other without a problem in different languages . As the person on one end speaks, Google would translate his words and re-speak them to the person on the other end.Franz Och, Google’s head of translation, believes that this technology will “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. Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch, but recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you. The phone should get a feel for your voice from past voice search queries, for example.”

It appears like Google has a long way to go before this becomes a full blown reality, but they are working on it diligently. If Mr. Och is right, then imagine your phone will really be able to learn from the other conversations you have, we hope this vision of Google’s will soon become a reality. But again, Google’s Voice still has ways to go with basic voice transcription.