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Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

I remember being in school playing with Google Earth. Hype back then was a bit different but I recall everyone who laid eyes on it was blown away.

Another great google product that I think is actually under hyped is Google translate. I was in Kiev and ordered off a menu by looking st it through my smartphone. Sitting at a table with 6 engineers and everyone was floored. If you haven't tried it I highly recommend it.

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Google translate has been seriously under the radar lately. I tried it recently and was pretty blown away. Using it almost daily now.

Google Translate has been improved immensely just in the past six months or so, through neural networking and machine learning [0]. It's become MUCH better at translating full sentences and coherent text - in some cases it's hard to differentiate from a competent human translation. They have made great improvements to both speech recognition [1] and text-to-speech[2] as well. It feels so damn sci-fi to just pull up a phone, talk into it and have it repeat what you said in japanese or spanish.

Siri is still mostly useful as a kitchen timer though.

[0] https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-mor...

[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/SpeechProcessing.html

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12860866/google-deepmind-wa...

Didn't Word Lens do it before Google Translate? I mean I was demo-ing that shit in 2010 (Google probably does it much better now).

Google bought Word Lens and then integrated the tech into Translate.

Recently Handy sent me a cleaning lady who couldn't speak English at all. I communicated with her entirely through Google Translate. We even negotiated an additional hour of work.

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