It seems like we're getting to the level that people talked about in Science Fiction not that long ago. Even when Google was started in 1998, I'm not sure that

It seems like we're getting to the level that people talked about in Science Fiction not that long ago. Even when Google was started in 1998, I'm not sure that people would believe you if you said that in 20 years Google would be putting out a product that automatically translates spoken conversations in realtime. Sure the technology isn't perfect, but it actually works surprisingly well (at least the translation part). I have been learning Mandarin Chinese recently, and the translations provided by Google Translate are pretty darn good (if not exact, they are close enough to understand).