Google had given Android users an opportunity to use the “Conversation Mode”, a way to speak into one’s phone in January. Today, Google has just moved a step ahead to help Android devices to speak back in a number of other languages too.
Google’s translation tool was originally supporting only the Spanish language, apart from English, which was a limitation on the device for almost 10 months. But now Google has added 12 more languages to the translation list, which makes the total count of languages to go up to 14. The newly added languages are Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.
Google has this announcement for its users coming just a day before the iPhone 4S will be arriving to the public. iPhone 4S would come with the most awaited Siri feature, which is more of a spoken assistant.
The intention here cannot still be to steal the show, off Siri as the two are related to one’s voice recognition, but they are still different in their approach. Google Translate is designed to translate from one language to another, which is appreciable in its own sense, but Siri assistant is designed to help users in getting their search query solved easily, which may be for things and even to complete tasks by speaking. This is a major distinction between the two features.
Talking about Google Translate, one can find this feature in the Android Market on their particular phone. It can also be found here.
A promotional video for the same can be viewed below:
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Google adding languages to Google Translate can help a number of users who intend to make use of the feature for couple of other languages. The procedure here is quite simple as a user has to speak into the microphone, which is later on converted by the the app. After its translated, the app would read it out loud. Then, as there is a response from the other person, one is speaking to, the app would first translate what is typed in by the other person and would read it back to the user.
A user may still face a number of problems, while using this app as product manager Jeff Chin notes that the technology is better now, but still is in its alpha stage. This could lead to a translation being affected by background noise and regional accents, which would affect accuracy. He continued saying, “But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more. We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.”
Chin still said that there are a few new added features, which would help a user as he said, “For example, if you wanted to say ‘Where is the train?’ but Google Translate recognizes your speech as ‘Where is the rain?’, you can now correct the text before you translate it. You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.”
He added, “When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view.”
However, the app once again seems to be optimized specifically for tablet screens.