Google Improves Android Translator To Battle Siri

judgecorp writes "Google Translate for Android, the mobile version of Google's machine translation software, now translates speech back and forth between 14 languages, the company claims. Earlier this year the company added Conversation Mode, which lets users to translate chats between English and Spanish. Now Google has made the tool available from Android 2.2 handsets and later in Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. The arrival of Siri on the iPhone could spark serious competition in translation systems on phones."

Re:Yes, that's neat but worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll, but version 2.2 of Google Translate for Android is currently available in the standard Android Market on my Verizon Droid2. And if it wasn't, and I really wanted it, I could just download it and install manually. The only thing Verizon holds back is OS revisions, and while it would be nice if they offered some sort of "early adopter" program where you could update before the new version has been certified, it's pretty understandable that they don't just push the updates out to everyone on release day since they have to support it.

Re:Yes, that's neat but worthless

[monkeyhybrid]

The app itself is free to download from the android market [android.com] and will run on any Android device running Andorid 1.5+. That's pretty much everything.

Conversation mode does appear to require Android 2.2 though, which means it should work on fine on ~85% of Android devices out in the wild.

Re:Siri and translation

[monkeyhybrid]

You are correct. I'm sure Siri will gain more functionality in the future but as it stands now, Siri should be compared to Voice Search [android.com] and other third party voice command apps.

Google Translate does translate.

Siri (on iPhone) and Voice Search (on Android) handle voice commands and interaction.

Funny thing about this Siri business....

[kervin]

First, the article makes no sense since Siri doesn't do translation. I guess translation doesn't "exist" yet since Apple doesn't have a product.

Google, Nuance and Microsoft have been pushing Speech Recognition for a few years now. These companies put millions into NLP R&D ever year and are on the forefront of technology. Apple had been ignoring this space and so these companies have had great Speech Recognition and other NLP products for a while and Apple doesn't.

Google and Microsoft are about to release the next wave of speech products ( e.g. in Android 4 and WP 8 ). These companies have NLP technology Apple hasn't even begin to tackle. Like NLP in all major world languages and across many markets ( eg. Checkout EngKoo [microsoft.com] for example )

IOS was falling behind and Apple scrambled to purchase a Speech recognition mobile app, quickly licensed Nuance and Wolfram Alpha knowledgebase technology, and added those APIs in the operating system. They had to remove Siri from their market place.

Marketing mentions DARPA, but just about all Speech R&D is funded in someway by DARPA. DARPA's been carrying that torch for a while now. Even the popular open source Pocket Sphinx [sourceforge.net] was made possible by partial DARPA funding.

In short this Siri marketing push is the largest scale astroturf marketing campaign I've ever seen.

Re:Funny thing about this Siri business....

[Henriok]

The problem with everything you mentions is that it can be awesomely great, but fundamentally useless if no one knows that it excises at all. I didn't know Google have any speech services, nor Microsoft. I do however know that Apple has, so what Apple have done is useful for me. What Google or Microsoft has done was impossible for me to use, since it was unknown to me.

Re:Siri and translation

[Terrasque]

You can use it for voice dictation... Just about every text input field, now has a microphone that simply lets you say what you were going to type... and the voice recognition is VERY good.

And that have been on Android since v1.6, actually.

Re:useless

[ergo98]

" I do not believe that local dialects and pronunciation is the issue"

I have been using the voice input functionality since it came out, and have been shocked at the startling accuracy of it. It is almost never wrong, and is eminently useful for navigation, making calls (by number or by name), or for voice dictation in a message. I use it frequently and it is shockingly rare that it isn't dead on.

I'm talking about just general voice to text, not about translate which adds another language to language issue, however Google has the voice recognition thing DOWN. I imagine there are some accents and manners of speech that present it difficulty however.