Google is working on an updated Google Translate app for Android that will recognize voices and provide real-time translation. The New York Times reports that Google is working on a new version of Google Translate that can detect when a person is speaking and will simultaneously interpret the speech into written text in a language chosen by the user.
The update, described as “coming soon,” will reportedly allow users to have their foreign-speaking friends speak into the phone and Google will provide the text translation of the text. Currently, Google Translate offers translation services for more than 90 languages, but it is unclear what languages will be available when Google rolls out the updated app.
Google engineering director of Google Translate Macduff Hughes says countries are interested in having their official language added to Google Translate as removing the language barrier is quickly becoming critical in a world where there are no boundaries.
Recently, Google added Kazakh to its language database after a government official appealed to the public to ask Google to add it to Google Translate.
“People can ask very, very strongly that we put their language on the service,” says Hughes.
Google’s automatic translation solutions are already available across several of its services. On Google Chrome, the web browser can immediately offer to translate a website in another language that is not the user’s chosen language. For instance, if a user visits a website in French, Chrome detects that and offers to translate the entire web page for the user.
In Gmail, users can also opt to have their languages set to other languages aside from English, including fictional languages such as Klingon and Pirate. Soon, Google will also reportedly offer a service that allows users to take a picture of a written text in a foreign language and have Google Translate provide a translation of the text in the picture.
The updated app will also reportedly feature better translations, as one who has ever used Google Translate to have entire paragraphs translated knows Google’s translation is often a hit-and-miss. This comes hot on the heels of a very similar service made available by Microsoft.
Skype Translator, which is currently in beta, allows users to speak to each other in their own languages while the machine translates their speech for them. Microsoft demonstrated this with elementary students from the United States and Mexico, one speaking in English and the other in Mexican, as the machine translated the English-speaking student’s speech to Mexican and vice versa. Such services growing in popularity are another cause of concern for privacy advocates, who fear that Google and Microsoft’s collection of call records for machine learning purposes that improve the accuracy of their services will allow third parties to snoop in on people’s private conversations.
However, Skype director of product marketing Olivier Fontana allays such fears by saying conversations are broken down into separate files, which helps them check for quality and prevent others from eavesdropping. “There is no way to know who said what,” Fontana says. “The NSA couldn’t make sense of this.” Hughes says Google Translate will use a similar strategy.
