Google is developing the world's first mobile phone with simultaneous translation capabilities.
Google will present the speech recognition and automated translation technology integrated into this phone, and hope that within a few years to develop the basic structure. If this idea can be realized, the world's 6,000 languages will eventually provide voice translation services.
Google has created a computer can be used in automated text translation system, and by millions of global multi-language Web sites and document scanning to enhance performance. So far, the service is already covered 52 languages, last week increased its support of Haitian Creole.
Google also has a voice recognition system that allows mobile phone users use the network search function. Just need to give voice commands without the need to manually enter text, you can get query results.
Google is currently integrating these two technologies, hoping to produce a piece of software to identify the user's voice will be translated into other languages. With professional translators, as this phone will also analyze statements until it understood the full meaning of a word or statement, will begin after the translation.
Google translation service director Franz Och, said: "We think speech to the speech translation is possible, and can be ordered in a few years to run." Obviously, you want to run smoothly, you need to high-precision machine translation and high-precision voice recognition technology to integrate. "
Although the automatic text translator compared the effect of the current good, but voice recognition need to face greater challenges. Och said: "Every person's voice, sensual, and tones were different. But the voice-recognition mobile phones can play a role, because the phone is designed to adapt to each user. For example, cell phone voice through the previous search requests are familiar with your voice . "
The greater use of this translation software, the higher the accuracy. Although some translation system using a simple syntax is the translation, but Google can rely on the database has a large number of multi-language Web site and translated the document to improve the system accuracy. Och said: "The more input data, the higher the quality." He said, there are a lot of language enthusiasts are willing to help.
However, some experts believe that simultaneous interpretation of the threshold remains high. Bangor University Linguistics Professor Emeritus David Crystal said: "The speech recognition problem is the diversity of accents. There is no better a system can solve this problem. Maybe Google will be better than other systems to provide faster processing speed, but I that will not happen within the next few years, a Glasgow slang that can handle high-speed equipment. "But he also said that the future of this equipment will be very interesting, if there really can be such a simultaneous interpretation service, it will no longer need to learn a foreign language.
