Google Translate Launches Transcribe for Android in 8 Languages

Google Translate today launched Transcribe for Android, a feature that delivers a continual, real-time translation of a conversation. From a report: Transcribe will begin by rolling out support for 8 languages in the coming days: English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. With Transcribe, Translate is now capable of translating classroom or conference lectures with no time limits, whereas before speech-to-text AI in Translate lasted no longer than a word, phrase, or sentence. Google plans to bring Transcribe to iOS devices at an unspecified date in the future.

Transcribe users can change the size of text that appears on screen for real-time translations or pause or resume a translation at any time. This is the latest real-time speech-to-text AI from Google. News today follows the announcement that Google Assistant now has the ability to read or translate 43 languages from a website with simple voice commands. Both the text-reading feature for Google Assistant and Transcribe for Translate were first previewed by Google in January.

Why Thai and no Mandarin?

[larryjoe]

It's interesting to consider to rankings [wikipedia.org] of the worldwide popularity (as a primary or secondary language) of the first 8 languages chosen: English (1) , French (5), German (12), Hindi (3), Portuguese (9), Russian (8), Spanish (4), and Thai (28). Thai seems to be an outlier. Maybe there was a Thai member of the Google team, or maybe the Thai language is amenable to such translation technologies? However, the really big question is why Mandarin was not chosen. Was the decision based on technical challeng

Re:

[_merlin]

Possibly because Baidu already does mandarin Chinese better than Google can and they don't want to get shown up with an inferior product.

YouTube captions

[ortholattice]

YouTube's "auto-generated" closed captions are often ridiculously inaccurate if they are intelligible at all. I can only assume this is the best they can do, since YouTube is one of their premier advertising platforms, and it doesn't make sense that they would use inferior technology that would (and does) turn off viewers. If they are using the same technology, I'm not optimistic about this.

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

I just tried Transcribe's ability to translate English into Russian.

It's awful. I mean just downright non-functional-level awful.

It hasn't gotten a single thing even close to right. It either produces words that are completely nonsense in context, or in many cases just types out a Cyrillic phonetic spelling of what I just said.

I'll take a hard pass on this one. At least until it's a lot better.

Bilingual Context Switching?

[Dayze!Confused]

I've been waiting for real bilingual support for a long time. Seems that this still requires to set which language is being spoken. This is particularly a problem with Chinese which works hard to transliterate words, but colloquially people will just through in the random English word. But it goes further than that, there are a lot of local dialects spoken that people context switch mid sentence, sometimes lasting as long as a single word, or even carrying on the rest of the conversation in the other dialec

hindi or hindustani?

[SG83]

will it work with urdu as well (spoken)?

The last time I tried that ...

[BAReFO0t]

I almost got into a fistfight with a drunk Japanese.

No thanks!

And I donât need a data kraken to spy on me anyway.

Offline, or GTFO!