Google Translate has been improved immensely just in the past six months or so, through neural networking and machine learning [0]. It's become MUCH better at t

Google Translate has been improved immensely just in the past six months or so, through neural networking and machine learning [0]. It's become MUCH better at translating full sentences and coherent text - in some cases it's hard to differentiate from a competent human translation. They have made great improvements to both speech recognition [1] and text-to-speech[2] as well. It feels so damn sci-fi to just pull up a phone, talk into it and have it repeat what you said in japanese or spanish. Siri is still mostly useful as a kitchen timer though. [0] https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-more-accurate-fluent-sentences-google-translate/ https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-mor... [1] https://research.google.com/pubs/SpeechProcessing.html https://research.google.com/pubs/SpeechProcessing.html [2] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12860866/google-deepmind-wavenet-ai-text-to-speech-synthesis http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12860866/google-deepmind-wa...