Google Shooting For Smartphone Universal Translator

nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language."

Re:Google is not far from Engrishisfunny.com...

[zero_out]

As someone with a background in AI and HCI, I completely agree. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go, and I think that Google is jumping the gun on this. It should prove to be quite humorous, even as first steps go.