Google Planning Voice Translation Software For Android? Android Phones Could Translate Foreign Languages During Conversations

Google's head of translation services, Franz Och, t
ells the Times that live voice translation could be available for
Android phones in a matter of years.ย Google would fuse its growing
expertise in text translation with its new voice search technology on
Android mobile phones to offer real, live voice translation.
Presently, Google's text translation service covers 52 languages,
including the addition of Haitian Creole last week.ย Google has
developed its text translation service by crawling and comparing
millions of multi-lingual websites and documents.ย It then uses this
translation data to provide text and website translation to users of
this translation service.
On the mobile side of its business, Google has released a voice search
system for Android's 2.x version.ย Users can speak into a handset mic
and Google's voice search system will recognize the spoken words and
perform a search.ย For the live voice translation service which
Google's Franz Och is developing, this voice search technology and
Google's text translation service would be merged to instantly translate
spoken voice.
As of yet, no dates or technical details have been revealed about the
arrival of Google's live voice translation service.ย This technology
would be a welcome addition to Android or any mobile phone service, as
our continually globalizing economy may yield a greater need for voice
translation.