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."

Siri and translation

[Lord Satri]

Siri doesn't do translations, it's more of an advanced voice recognition tool. Am I wrong? This would mean that at the moment, Apple's Siri and Google Translation would have two different strengths; Siri: usable natural language voice recognition (at least that's how they sell it) and Google Tranlation, well, multi-language translations.

Google Improves Android Translator To Battle Siri?

[Pieroxy]

Why the catchy headline "To Battle Siri"? Why wouldn't it be just for "Improving Android Translator"?

Siri doesTranslation?

[Grizzley9]

Does Siri even do translation? Every time I've asked it to translate an English word into Spanish it says it doesn't know what I mean. This is not "battling" Siri at all. Catchy key-word title to get more clicks is what I see.

Your mother is called.

[Jawnn]

She said to tell you to stop being so serious about trivial shit like what one smart phone does and another can't. Oh, she also said to get a life and move out of her basement.

Re:Siri and translation

[adamstew]

Siri isn't even just voice recognition. It uses voice recognition as the input for it to perform tasks or lookup trivia type questions for you. Things like "schedule a meeting with my boss tomorrow at 10 about next year's budget". That's all you need to say, and Siri will create a meeting invite in Exchange, inviting my boss for a meeting at 10... it'll title the meeting "Next Year's Budget".

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.

So while google is using voice recognition, it is using it for two different applications. It's like saying Microsoft Word is competing with Adobe Photoshop because they both use the mouse as an input device. You can't even use Siri for translation. But it wouldn't surprise me if Apple added a similar type of translation feature to Siri... although I doubt it would show up in a conversationalist way... More like "translate 'where is the nearest hospital' in to french".

Except it's not

[hellfire]

Except Siri doesn't do translation, it does voice command recognition. This is a fail by the editors, picking a submission that deliberately creates an "Apple vs Google" headline to stir up page loads. It's like comparing Google Reader to Apple Mail, it's nonsensical.

Re:Yes, that's neat but worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Cut him some slack, he's probably an iOS user and used to the fact that the OS arbitrarily adds in apps he can't remove or bans ones he wants.

useless

[Blymie]

Google's voice search, and translate, and all other speech -> text products are absolutely useless. I find a very, very, very low success rate.

Good luck if I'm driving in a car too, and the background noise adds to the difficulty.

I know many other people that are in the same boat, but these are all locals. I wonder if other people think it's just great to have to repeat themselves 10 times, or if others do not have the same issues. I do not believe that local dialects and pronunciation is the issue, the english I hear here, seems to be the same english I might hear on Northern US news reports, on TV stations.

However, as it sits? Useless!