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Google hints at instant translation technology

08/02/2010 Google hints at instant translation technology Technology professionals should soon be able to benefit from instant translation services while making phone calls to international clients or colleagues, it has been revealed.

While acknowledging that converting speech from one language to another will be significantly more difficult than translating text, Google has nevertheless expressed confidence that it should have the first instant translation technology free to use within the next couple of years.

According to Franz Och, head of translation services at the search engine giant, the new technology will be geared towards individual needs, thereby making differences in pitch, accent and speed largely irrelevant.

"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," he said.

He added that the "huge progress" made in the fields of machine translation and instant voice technology over the past few years suggests that instant translation applications could be an integral part of smartphones within the foreseeable future.

News of the innovative technology comes soon after the head of the marketing agency Greenlight advised that Google's new voice search engine function is likely to have a major impact on the internet, with small businesses in particular set to benefit.


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