It's hard enough for machines to translate text; harder to translate spoken language; and harder still to do it in real time. But tech behemoth Google is working on technology to do exactly that.
"Head of translation services at Google, Franz Och, said he believed almost instant speech-to-speech translation should be possible if the accuracy of voice recognition and machine translation can be improved. He said Google is working on this, and he expected the technology to “work reasonably well” in a few years. There has been a great deal of progress in voice recognition and machine translation in recent years, especially the latter, thanks to funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)."
Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? Hehe, couldn't resist.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that BabelFish won't solve the language problem, if we take that to mean a universal translator of all languages (or even just human ones :-). But, if they could even get reasonable performance with instantaneous verbal translation between just TWO languages, that would be a huge step. Once we can do it with two languages, the rest are just more of the same.