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Google discusses launch of translation software for mobiles

Google says it plans to add voice recognition and translation features into mobile applications, according to a report by the Sunday Times.

Google’s head of translation services, Franz Och, told the paper, "we think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and will work reasonably well in a few years' time.” He continued, "clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we are working on."

The firm already offers the automatic text translation on websites and now hopes to offer the service on its mobile applications. Och explains that offering translations of voice is much more complex than translating text, "everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch.” He continued, "but recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you. The phone should get a feel for your voice from past voice search queries, for example."

Och explained that frequent use is the key to the success of voice translation. He says that the more the software is used, the more accurate it will become.