Imagine being able to go anywhere in the world and communicate. Imagine being
able to visit a village in northern Laos, pull out your phone, and have a
conversation. Or imagine being able to make a call and have your phone do the
rough work of translating on the fly. It would need to do many very difficult
tasks simultaneously to pull this off. It would need to detect the languages
being spoken, understand them, interpret them in real time and translate them.
Tucked away in the
cavalcade of nonsense and borderline sexism that was the
Galaxy S4 launch, Samsung announced a pretty cool feature in its latest
flagship phone: built-in translation for nine languages. Although it remains to
be seen how well it actually works, it’s pretty exciting. In fact, I hope it’s
the future of the kind of computing muscle we put into voice.
Look, Siri is great and all. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy
barking commands at a phone that may or may not elicit a nonsensical response.
But for the most part, voice control services like Siri and Google Voice Search
are doing novel things, not truly useful things. That is why I’d love to see
universal automatic translation baked in as a smartphone feature. I’m ready for
the babel fish.
In The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the babel fish was a small creature that acted like a universal
translator. Stick it in your ear, and you could understand anyone (anything,
really) anywhere. A lot of our best ideas come from science fiction. And while
many remain far off, this one is increasingly close to reality.
Read More | http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/bring-on-the-babel-fish/
Read More | http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/03/bring-on-the-babel-fish/
