Google to launch instant speech translator for smartphones

The Times reports that the software would take the information learned from the company's text translation software, and Google’s existing voice recognition tools for smartphones.

At launch, the software will only be able to analyse small segments of speech before translation, but Google is aiming to develop the technology to work over long segments of speech, essentially helping people conduct whole conversations in another language.

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

"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. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently,” Och added.

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