Google Translate For Android Now Translates As You Talk (VIDEO)

Douglas Adams would have been proud: Google has just brought Planet Earth one step close to a Babel Fish of our own.

On Wednesday, Google unveiled a new Android feature which translates speech in real time. So far "Conversation Mode" -- an updated feature for last year's Google Translate -- is only available in Spanish and English, but the results are pretty cool. Once the app is activated, if you are speaking English, the phone instantly translates your speech into Spanish and then speaks it out loud, and vice versa.

The app is available for download now for Android users with 2.1 or higher.

In the video below from last September, google CEO Eric Schmidt previews Conversation Mode at a conference in Berlin.

Obviously the implications for travelers are pretty big. An app like this would make shopping, ordering in restaurants and travel arrangements abroad much easier. The overall app -- Google Translate -- is now seeing daily usage from more than 150 countries and supports 53 language for text input, according to Techcrunch. Techcrunch has more details here.

Comments

[DismayedRepub]

12:40 PM on 01/17/2011

Ack, ack. Ack, ack, ack……

[ColoBlue]

12:10 AM on 01/16/2011

I've found that electronic translators really aren't that helpful. Since they are only able to translate things literally, the translations often come out pretty ridiculous.

[MrVee]

11:04 AM on 01/15/2011

I wonder if this is better than the Google text Translate. I recently tried to use it to translate conversation to from English to Czech and they were more annoyed with the translation than anything. Looks good though and based on the comments so far, its promising technology.

[ChiProgressive]

02:45 PM on 01/14/2011

I just downloaded the newest version of Google Translate with Conversation mode which currently only works in English to Spanish translation.

I "went" to a cafe in Barcelona to order some coffee and ask where the bathroom is.

It worked!

I'm really looking forward to updates as this feature is still an alpha. Google translate has improved so much in the past 2 years that it won't be long until we have full Star Trek communicator ability.

Interestingly though, it censors English bad words from being translated into Spanish, but not vice versa.

Anyone have similar experiences?

[noway lv]

06:38 PM on 01/14/2011

Having younger brothers, that was the first thing they tried. The phone censored the english to spanish swear word but allowed the spanish to english swear word lol.

[Mark Mayhew]

09:05 PM on 01/13/2011

i showed Google Translate (and Talk to Me Cloud) to my coworkers and we couldn't stop using it!

[wilray]

07:03 PM on 01/13/2011

Brillant

[bavb63]

05:28 PM on 01/13/2011

Fantastic!