Can Google transform communication?

Communication for the future

If Google has its way, it's set to transform communication within years as it develops software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly.

By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a few years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world's 6000-plus languages and revolutionise business.

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, the British paper The Times reports.

Google has also developed a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in.

Its aim now is to combine the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller's 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.

Translation services

"We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time," said Franz Och, Google's head of translation services.

"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."

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."

The translation software is likely to become more accurate the more it is used. And while some translation systems use crude rules based on the grammar of languages, Google is using its vast database of websites and translated documents to improve the accuracy of the system.

Doubt over Google

Despite Google's optimism, some experts believe the hurdles to live translation remain high. David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said: "The problem with speech recognition is the variability in accents. No system at the moment can handle that properly.

"Maybe Google will be able to get there faster than everyone else, but I think it's unlikely we'll have a speech device in the next few years that could handle high-speed Glaswegian slang."

Related News:

Google moves away from IE6 |What are the challenges moving to Google Apps? |Is the battle heating up in Silicon Valley? |Online Tech: The new money spinners

Like this article? Get the RSS feed: