At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week Google previewed a new technology that
allows its Goggles application for Android phones to recognize and translate text using
the phone’s camera and internet connection.
For the first time again this is a preview, like the German voice search. I want to preview
with you optical character recognition paired with real time translation. So I have here,
you can see this is a German language menu and I would assume that many of you would
not be able to know what to eat tonight, but if you have Google Goggles Translation what
you can do is you zoom in, take a picture. Place it there. So the speech.
(applause)
It wasn’t the only language translation demonstration that Google did, the company
also showed voice recognition working with a new language.
So we introduced the English version about a year ago and since then we have covered
Mandarin and Japanese language and tonight for the first time I’m going to show you
a fourth language, German. You might have guessed that. So the same process, we have
something simple first, “Bilder von Berlin.” I apologize usually it’s much snappier,
but we’re all competing for bandwidth, but here you see some nice iconic images from
Berlin, but how about something a little bit more involved. Let’s say you want to know
about the hip nightclub in Berlin. “Techno club Berghain Panorama Bar in Berlin.” You
know that place? So here is the map and you can see the page.
(applause)
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that it’s only a matter of time before real time translation
can happen over the phone.
Well, I’ve got voice recognition, I’ve got Google Translation so I can translate
from a hundred languages to a hundred languages so why can’t I just talk on the phone to
somebody who doesn’t speak my language. Well we’re not quite there, but it’s coming.
And it’s coming because of the unique intersection of computing and communications and cloud
and cloud based data storage and the development of algorithms that were only ideas on whiteboards
over the last few years.
Reporting from Boston, I’m Nick Barber, IDG News Service.
