New Google App will Automatically Translate Speech into Text in Real-Time

This new app will be available for smartphones soon and will offer translation of 90 languages.

Google will soon be updating its translation app for smartphones and will now offer 90 different languages along with the new ability to hear spoken translations of a few popular languages. This update will enable the app to automatically recognize if someone is speaking a popular language and then automatically turn it into written text. 

According to NYTimes, Google has claimed that its Translation app has been installed more than 100 million times on Android phones and all these will be able to receive the upgrade. Macduff Hughes, the engineering director of Google Translate stated that the company currently has 500 million active users of Translate every month across all of the company’s platforms. Hughes further stated that as 80 t0 90 percent of the web is in just 10 languages the translation becomes a critical part of learning for many people. 

The Chrome browser by Google already automatically translates web pages into some of the major languages and this is a very useful feature. People that use the Google browser can render a page that is in English into Korean for example.

Plus the browser also allows changing things like Gmail settings into 140 different languages. Moreover Google is developing even the small things on this translation app such as a service that will enable users to hold their phones up to a foreign street sign and get an automatic translation on the screen. 

Moreover Microsoft’s Bing Translation engine is already being used on Twitter and Facebook. Both these social networking sites feature communication across the borders of language. Plus now people have started to even ask the Google service to put their native languages on the translation app.

This was also stated by Mr. Hughes who stated that people sometimes ask very strongly that the company put their language on this service. Plus linguistic experts are worried as they say that the machines look more deeply at individual uses of meaning through things like intonation and humor and this could create many problems.

Kelly Fitzsimmons the co-founder of the Hypervoice Consortium, which researches the future of communication, stated that this technology is no doubt very useful and important; however there are real threats too.

He further stated that what would it mean to have a corpus of conversations after there is a regime change and the new government does not like what people have said, there will be a lot of trouble then. 

Moreover Mr. Hughes has stated that Google has been very careful about what it did with voice mainly because of potential issues around biometric security in case voice recognition replaced passwords.

This app with its updates will become one of the most important apps in the world and would be a necessity of everyone. With the world becoming interlinked through Internet and technology, translation of language has become a vital technology.