It won’t be long before we will be able to simply pop headphones in our ears and hear someone talk to us in our language, regardless of which language they are speaking.
It has already been done visually with World Lens so how long will it take?
It makes me think of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Image being able to speak to anyone in the world, and never having to learn a new language! That is AWESOME!
So what technologies would it need?
- A Recorder or live stream- To translate the voices, the app would need a recording mechanism to record the person speaking and upload it for processing. Either that or a live stream to a language translator.
- A massive Phoneme Database- A live language translator would need a really big speech-to-text phoneme database. (Kinda like Google already built with 1-800-Goog-411 or what Apple is buying with word of Apple’s purchase of Nuance.(
- Better Translation- As it is now, Google Translate do not work so hot. The solution is programed to learn as it goes via human intervention and requires a massive amount of human intervention to get it trained. . However, as it learns in the text environment, speech-to-text will move it to vocal automatically.
- Better text to speech tonal matching. Now this is not a requirement, but rather a “want”. 🙂 But I think it would be cool if they could incorporate some sort of “matching” algorithym into the playback of the translated text to make it sound like the speaker.
Ok. There you have it. The fact is, all of this technology is available via APIs right now. So if you wanted to build a scaled down version of this, it is out there.
Maybe God will come back when we can all get together and talk one language?