Google does seem to have dipped their fingers into a slew of different projects, and this time around, we have word that their very own real-time translation project for the spoken – take note, spoken, and not written, word over smartphones are inching closer and closer to the 100% accuracy mark, which is something that ought to make everyone else sit up and take notice. In an interview with Android’s Vice President Hugo Barra, he revealed that hardware prototypes (of the Android-powered variety, of course) are currently being tested, and these have achieved “near perfect” results where some language pairs are concerned.
Of course, there is also the fact that this real-time speech translation work is a very delicate and tricky one to be part of since it is tested in a controlled environment, and the bottleneck happens to be speech recognition in real-life conditions, where you have all sorts of background noise and accents to deal with, but all of those kinks should be worked out in due time. Who knows, one might even find real-time speech translation being thrown into a future version of Android, and it might be more difficult for language teachers to earn a living after that.
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