We are all now familiar with text-to-speech or TTS, as it has been implemented in some fashion ever since the G1 days. Now Google wants to add another innovative idea to the arsenal. Speech-to-speech will attempt to translate your voice input to output your native language into a foreign language.
Google has always been looking into new and exciting was for us to communicate and their ideas are usually really innovative and this is no exception. This will be an awesome feat if they can manage to combine two technologies which is taking the callers voice and translating it through voice synthesis while translating it in the process. With the fast progression of phone technology more and more great new services will become available. Here’s a quote from the man in charge of Google’s translation technologies:
“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services.
This will be great if Google can bring it to Android but there are some obstacles to overcomes such as the ones stated in the quote:
David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said:“The problem with speech recognition is the variability in accents. No system at the moment can handle that properly.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
[via bgr, timesonline]
Babel Fish anyone?
Babel Fish anyone?