Cellphone can be the Interpreter as you Speak!!!

Now cellphone be the interpreter as you speak Time To Throw Away Foreign Language Phrase Books As New Software Will Provide Instant Translation Chris Gourlay Google is developing software for the first phone which is capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the worlds 6,000-plus 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 callers voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language. Like a professional human interpreter, the phone would analyse packages of speech, listening to the speaker until it understands the full meaning of words and phrases, before attempting translation. We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years time, said Franz Och, Googles head of translation services. Although automatic text translators are now reasonably effective, voice recognition has proved more challenging. Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch, said Och. 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. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the small, yellow Babel Fish was capable of translating any language when placed in the ear.