Google working on real-time voice translation phone

Imagine a future where a researcher in Edmonton speaks English into his phone and another researcher in Montreal hears those words in French. The instant translation would bring to life the dream of many sci-fi fans, as well as be a groundbreaking communication tool.

That future doesn’t seem so far off because Google is actually working on a product that would provide automatic, real-time language translation. According to statements made to the Times of London, Google could release a translation phone in a few years.

“Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on,” said Franz Och, Google head of translation services. “If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.”

Of course, the problem with this happening is that technology hasn’t caught up to reality. Google Voice has a reputation for providing comically bad transcription services to U.S. users, and those problems will likely get worse when factoring in how voice recognition software will deal with accents and individual voices. It’s hard enough for some software to distinguish between accents from people within similar cities, so it will be troublesome to build a device capable of translating the 6,000-plus languages and the thousands of dialects based on those languages.

It will still be exciting to track how close Google gets to pulling this off. An auto-translator could make it easier for companies to do business internationally if they can communicate with people in other nations. Olympic athletes, students, travelers, and regular folks could also benefit from the real-life Babel Fish.