Last week, we were all impressed with how the new Google Goggles visual text recognition and translation app worked. While the output was often grammatically intriguing given the current state of electronic translation software, the fact of the matter was that the service did what it was supposed to do and considering all the limits of current technology, it did its’ job very well.
And while we have not finished tipping our collective hats off to Google for once again finding another way to make the Android smart phone an invaluable device to have around; they also beefed up their current audio translation software and have come to include a whole new set of languages to the mix.
Here is the list of the new supported languages as listed by Google: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
This pretty much turns the Android smart phone into the ultimate traveler’s helper as it is not only able to translate signs you see on the road, but it will also help out by giving users an idea of what the locals are saying.
The app runs by making use of Google’s basic translation software to convert written content into another language. The text is then converted into audio format and played. It is stated that right now, the spoken output is not of the same quality as the previously launched service, but as Google is still expanding and polishing the translation software (as “clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect”), users can expect to see this improve over the next couple of months.
Originally, the first batch of languages supported by the service included English, Haitian, French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish.
Tags: Google, google-android, Google-Translate, Google-Translation