Voice translation feature for smartphones from Google

13th February, 2010 by adina
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On February 7, 2010, Google announced the possibility of voice-to-voice translation for phones, being the first company to do this. Based on existing text conversion, voice recognition and search from Android, the company seems to be currently developing a new system which will be able to recognize a spoken foreign language and reproduce the text in the user’s native language. The system would fragment the speech into segments and analyze the pattern of speech and Google’s translation history in order to make the best interpretation possible.

Franz Och, head of the translation services, declared for The Times that this type of system, working reasonably well, could be ready within a few years. Despite this, he hasn’t mentioned which other platforms, besides Android, could get this feature.

Even if Google has been roughly criticized for flawed speech-to-text translation in its service, Google Voice, it seems that, so far, the company owns the most advanced and efficient voice recognition system among smartphone OS makers until now. Google is the only company which has voice-dictated map searching, allowing Droid and Nexus users to speak searches for different locations, based not only on specific addresses, but also on the type and general area of the place. Voice-guided searching is also available for Android 2.x, directly from the home screen.


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