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July 29, 2013

Google Developing 'Universal Translator' for Android

Whether it’s the Babel fish from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the UT from Star Trek or TARDIS technology used by the Doctor himself, the idea of a universal translator has only existed in science fiction. Google is looking to change that with plans to launch phones that work as “universal translators.”

While talking about this device, Hugo Barra, a vice-president of Android services, said that the plans to create “real time” translation have been stuck in the early stages.

“That is where we’re headed. We’ve got tons of prototypes of that sort of interaction, and I’ve played with it every other week to see how much progress we’ve made,” reported The Times.

Barra said the difficulties in the project thus far were due to speech recognition issues in everyday environments, but that the device had reached close to 100 percent fluency in controlled environments while translating from English to Portuguese.

Engineers at Google are optimistic and ready to make this happen.

“We want you to be able to translate things instantly,” said Josh Estelle, an engineer with Google Translate. “We want those conversations to happen.”

Babel fish isn't a name that should be unfamiliar with tech fans. Beyond its origins in the Douglas Adams novel, it was also the moniker given to one of the first Web translation tools, powered by Altavista and then Yahoo.

Since May 2012, Babel fish has been redirected to Bing Translator. Yahoo did not sell its translation application to Microsoft but simply transitioned its Babel fish translation services to Bing Translator.




Edited by Rich Steeves


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