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Google “Babel” phone announced

10 February 2010

google-nexus-flickr-osd8info

I grew up with Star Trek. The first years I never wondered why Captain Picard and his crew could communicate with aliens without any difficulty. After all, the universal language is English, right? 😉 With the latest (and newest) episodes we know that the first Enterprise had a language specialist on board. And then the universal translator was invented. Now apparently Google wants to leapfrog innovation and build a phone that can translate at an instant, as I read in The Times the other day. Now, is that maybe why the new Google phone is called Nexus? Wasn’t there the Nexus in Star Trek as well? OK, back to the point. Google Translate is already quite a powerful tool, so combining speech recognition with its Translate Tool will definitely be a jump in language technology. Granted, the could call their new app babel fish, just to make it sound right according to Douglas Adams. But then they would probably get into a fight with Yahoo Babelfish.

PS What I am really hoping for is that Google gets it’s innovation timeline straightened up: First the Enterprise, then the universal translator. Come on guys, I know you can do it.

Image credit: osde8info, flickr

2 Comments »

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    […] York times discusses the way how Google tries to tackle the translation problem. I wrote about the Google babel phone idea a couple of weeks ago but I wanted to pick up the topic nonetheless. As the article points out […]

  • Icelandic pronunciation - Language Technology said:

    […] volcano Eyjafjalla the correct way. Sounds kind of funny but it’s the next step to their babel phone. Just wondering when they add more animal languages to their speech output. Oh, that reminds me of […]