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This article is BS. Machine translation has been improving but it's still nowhere close to being able to provide real-time translation of spoken languages, and

This article is BS. Machine translation has been improving but it's still nowhere close to being able to provide real-time translation of spoken languages, and I bet anything it won't be there after another decade. I know for a fact that Baidu is throwing lots of money and people at fundamental R&D in translating Asian languages, and it's no piece of cake. As for "earpieces whispering nearly simultaneous translations", it would be a cool party trick but I doubt they'll work in real life. These moonshot projects have been around for decades, and they make for some cool entertainment at conferences and demos in very tightly controlled settings. As for the predictions that "the software in the cloud connected to the earpiece in your ear will re-create the voice of the speaker", the author should take up writing bad science fiction.

astrodust 11y ago
It depends on what the bar for "good enough" and "fast enough" is. Remember that Google Translate, just one example, was pretty feeble to start but has proven itself to be adequate for most needs now even if a lot of the meaning gets lost in translation. Could that be paired up with Google Voice? Absolutely. It's not easy, but it's inevitable.
- Brakenshire 11y ago
  I wouldn't say there are that many situations where Google Translate is good enough, to be honest. It's not so different from an automatic way of looking words or phrases up in a dictionary.
ebiester 11y ago
I can't remember who said it, but someone said technology changes less in 1 year than anyone expects, but more in 10 years. Translation, however, is a tricky bit. Due to the nature of the structure of language, it would have to be "say a sentence, wait, respond, wait" which would slow down the course of a conversation significantly. I think you could get to usefulness for simple transactions today if you're google or apple for a romance language in a standard accent. You would probably have to download something beforehand to preload the soundex for that set of accents, but it's within the power of your phone to do so. You'd probably need the top 3000 words + food + touristic places + top 5000 idioms in a set of common accents for the region, but that's not too bad compared to talking about something like politics. The top phones have the power to do that today.
greggyb 11y ago
I'll just leave these here. July 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuWN5AxlgxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuWN5AxlgxU http://www.skype.com/en/translator-preview/ http://www.skype.com/en/translator-preview/

astrodust 11y ago

It depends on what the bar for "good enough" and "fast enough" is. Remember that Google Translate, just one example, was pretty feeble to start but has proven itself to be adequate for most needs now even if a lot of the meaning gets lost in translation. Could that be paired up with Google Voice? Absolutely. It's not easy, but it's inevitable.

Brakenshire 11y ago
I wouldn't say there are that many situations where Google Translate is good enough, to be honest. It's not so different from an automatic way of looking words or phrases up in a dictionary.

ebiester 11y ago

I can't remember who said it, but someone said technology changes less in 1 year than anyone expects, but more in 10 years. Translation, however, is a tricky bit. Due to the nature of the structure of language, it would have to be "say a sentence, wait, respond, wait" which would slow down the course of a conversation significantly. I think you could get to usefulness for simple transactions today if you're google or apple for a romance language in a standard accent. You would probably have to download something beforehand to preload the soundex for that set of accents, but it's within the power of your phone to do so. You'd probably need the top 3000 words + food + touristic places + top 5000 idioms in a set of common accents for the region, but that's not too bad compared to talking about something like politics. The top phones have the power to do that today.

greggyb 11y ago

I'll just leave these here. July 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuWN5AxlgxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuWN5AxlgxU http://www.skype.com/en/translator-preview/ http://www.skype.com/en/translator-preview/