The ingredients for an instant translation tool already exist, and we don’t have to wait until the 23rd century. I’ve been thinking about how such a translator might work, and because I’ll never get around to doing it myself, the recipe is set out below.
Ingredients
- One smartphone with voice to text and a 3G or WiFi connection and Bluetooth
- One Bluetooth earpiece
Method
- The speaker talks into the phone.
- The phone converts the speech into text.
- The text goes wirelessly to Google, where one of the Google elves translates it into the target language and sends the translated text back to the phone.
- A phone app converts the new text to speech.
- The speech is delivered to the recipient’s ear through the Bluetooth earpiece.
According to Douglas Adams, such a device could cause “…more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Whilst surfing the net to find a picture of the Star Trek Universal Translator (Reference: TOS “Metamorphosis”), I found that a much less clunky version of my idea already appears to exist.
http://www.speechgear.info/products/interact
Oh well. Such a shame I gave up my day job.
There's an iPhone app called Say Hi that does just that - it's pretty brilliant!
ReplyDeleteAlcatel-Lucent is working on one for the normal phones to be used in offices and call centres. Opens up a whole host of new possibilities. Of course yours is so much more fun.
ReplyDeletewhat about a device that tells me what my girlfriend means when she says "yes", or "no", or anything at all, really... =/
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