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Comment by JunkDNA | Hacker News Reader

"Google is quick to note that this is very much an alpha feature. In other words, expect a lot of hiccups. They note that background noise, thick accents, and quick speech can all trip up the app."

Wow, so it's not practically useful very frequently?

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dude.. google is getting closer to a real time universal speech translator and you find a way to be unimpressed. What does impress you ?

Hate to repost it but:

Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

My guess would be a babel fish. It only picks up on subconscious frequencies, so outside noise will not get in the way. It also proves the non-existence of god.

I didn't intend for that comment to sound quite as snarky as it did. But my point is that real time speech translation needs to work precisely in those situations. Voice recognition and computerized translation have been around for a while. They are nearly always stymied by the problems mentioned in the article we have been "close" to this for at least a decade. What would impress me is if they had developed new algorithms to overcome these exceptionally challenging problems.

Voice recognition and computerized translation have been around for a while.

Now your reaction makes sense. If you're viewing at as an advance in the technology here (research wise, etc), then this announcement has nothing new. But from a standpoint of anyone with an Android phone having access to this whenever they want (accessibility and ease of use), this is incredible. I think most people are concerned with the latter, but you do have a point about there being nothing "new" here.

Who would have thought that alpha software is in fact very alpha-like in it's qualities?

The "background noise, thick accents, and quick speech" is actually the most difficult part.

Google did not really do anything new. Speech recognition is around for a while, as well as translation engines. Although putting the two technologies on the cell phone makes an impressive demo and good PR, it does not actually solves the problem at a practical level.

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