Google working on real-time voice translation app for phones
...Only instead of a fish, Google's version will be an app that runs on your smartphone. But you'll still probably hold it up to your ear.
The Times reports that Google hopes to have a working application ready within the next few years. The idea is that your phone would be able to conduct real-time translation for you. So you could be visiting Japan, Hungary, or Iraq and communicate with the locals without taking all that time to actually learn the language and customs. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, anyone that has ever used Google Translate or Google Voice knows that machine-translation and speech to text systems are still prone to errors. You often get clunky sentences that include nonsense words. So I'm not really all that hopeful that cellphones in 2012 will solve all of the world's communication problems. But we're certainly inching closer to the Babel Fish.
[via MobileCrunch]
Chromatic is one of the best time-wasters I've recently come across. It's all about the gameplay -- no Flash graphics here. You play a "circle" (it doesn't really have a name in the game). You move around with the arrow keys, and you change colors with Z, X, and C.
You can either be red, blue, or yellow, and you can switch at any time during the game. Each color has different capabilities -- yellow can double-jump, while red has a longer dash (which is like a forward sprint, activated by double-pressing DOWN).
Each ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brian Barker said 1:43PM on 2-19-2010
Why not look long term and have a spoken international language, on a person-to-person basis :)
We seem to be back to Esperanto here. Just have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0
Dr Kvasnak teaches English at Florida Atlantic University.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
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Jamie said 11:55AM on 4-16-2010
This could be great. Unfortunately it'll be ruined and rendered unusable by cripplingly expensive roaming data charges. It'll be an online app like most google stuff so you'll need a data connection to use it. Utterly useless whilst roaming.
For this reason, although great, google navigation, if it comes to europe, will only be realistically usable in your own country.
This is where google's model of everything in the cloud fails completely.
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