Monday, September 3, 2012

Universal Translation


To continue my series of posts going on about bloody Star bloody Trek:

We got:

fairly good automatic speech recognition
fairly good automatic translation via Google Translate
very widespread adoption of high-powered portable computers with network connections and GPS.
very good automatic speech generation

Why do we not got an app that will listen to anyone speaking, try speech recognition with the local language and accent, and spit out an accuratish translation in the user's language?

2 comments:

  1. My thought is that we can't translate language reliably without processing the *meaning* of what is being said. To do that one needs a person who understands both languages -- an AI or a human translator. Of course, we don't know how to program an AI (yet)

    http://goo.gl/WGDeZ

    This isn't to say that google translate isn't useful. It's quicker for a non-speaker to work by correcting its output than by translating from scratch, I think.

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