Google is working on speech to speech real time translator that would automatically translate any foreign language into the language of your choice (your native language) and vice versa. So, basically this will allow multi lingual phone conversation in real time. It is believed that Google plans to use this speech to speech translator for Android. Google already has a free online text translator. As reported by Times Online, the software is in paramilitary stages and might take few years. This is going to be a tough task considering the complexities involved in language translation. Practically speaking it is almost impossible to create a 100% accurate language translation.

Of all the challenges in a speech recognition system, accent remains the biggest challenge including accurate grammar translation, understand the right context of the sentence/word, understanding and using the right tone, understanding words that have almost no meaning in some other language etc. The key here will be how well the system learns over time and then after preliminary learning probably how well the system gets toned for a particular individual. The most interesting and appealing part in this remains that Google is doing this for mobile phones and Google’s translation Head Franz Och hits it right when he said to Times that ‘recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you’. Should be interesting how this project turns out.

On a different note, if this turns out to be successfully then it might go a long way in helping the language divide in India. You can say Bombay and people on the other side will hear Mumbai saving you from a lot of trouble!

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