Google Planning Voice Translation Software For Android?

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Google’s head of translation services, Franz Och, tells the Times that live voice translation could be available for Android phones in a matter of years.  Google would fuse its growing expertise in text translation with its new voice search technology on Android mobile phones to offer real, live voice translation.

Presently, Google’s text translation service covers 52 languages, including the addition of Haitian Creole last week.  Google has developed its text translation service by crawling and comparing millions of multi-lingual websites and documents.  It then uses this translation data to provide text and website translation to users of this translation service.

On the mobile side of its business, Google has released a voice search system for Android’s 2.x version.  Users can speak into a handset mic and Google’s voice search system will recognize the spoken words and perform a search.  For the live voice translation service which Google’s Franz Och is developing, this voice search technology and Google’s text translation service would be merged to instantly translate spoken voice.

As of yet, no dates or technical details have been revealed about the arrival of Google’s live voice translation service.  This technology would be a welcome addition to Android or any mobile phone service, as our continually globalizing economy may yield a greater need for voice translation.