Google Assistant Can Now Translate Languages on Your Phone

I recently vacationed in Japan, and I found that using Google Translate on the phone wasn't practical because the other person would have no clue what was going on or how they are supposed to work with the app. The language auto-detect was abysmal; half the time it thought Japanese was English. They would start responding to the translated statement before the app played the chime, and I'd have to rudely interrupt them and fumble with the app to get it to start listening again. They were never sure when it was "okay" to start talking again.

In the end I tended to communicate everything I really needed by holding up the number of things I wanted on my fingers and pointing and smiling, caveman-style. They would usually know just enough English to say, "Two? Ok." Then the price of whatever I was buying would show up on the register surrounded by mystery Japanese characters, but the numbers were Western Arabic, so that was all I needed to know.

One thing I learned is that you can get by with very little knowledge of the local language to successfully travel and eat.

This sort of thing is surprisingly useful.

A couple of weeks ago I was going to Human Resources on the other side of campus and there was a Chinese family wandering around, obviously lost.

The mother showed me her phone with some Chinese-language map app that I'd never seen before. It indicted that there was a shopping mall where we were standing. Obviously, her map app was wrong since the company has been at this location for 30 years.

But I was able to say to my phone, "Hey, Siri. How to you say 'I'm sorry, there is no shopping center here.' In Chinese?" And then I held my phone for her to see while Siri both printed out the translation on the screen and spoke it to her. I said a few other hopefully helpful phrases to her, but she seemed happy with my guidance and did lots of smiling and nodding.

(I assume the article is about the Google version of this. I wasn't able to read the article because Wired popped up so many ads and DIV modals on the screen that there wasn't any actual story text.)

Isn’t the title wrong? The audio is sent to the server so it’s not “on my phone.”

This type of translation was already available “on my phone” completely offline (written, with Google Translate)

I use translation often and I was hoping to finally have an easy way to have a written conversation, but this still doesn’t show the right keyboard when picking the language in “Keyboard” mode.

I saw this video before its public release circa 1993. Autotranslation, virtual agents, realtime video conferencing on handheld devices, virtual reality... all there. I was finishing my postdoc at Bell Labs where it was shown to us as a glimpse into the company's future plans. I didn't know where the bandwidth would come from and neither did the presenter when I asked except to say that "It will have to be built, won't it?." Needless to say I didn't have the foresight to invest in it, either

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFWCoeZjx8A&feature=emb_logo

"AT&T's vision of the future, circa 1993 - AT&T Archives"

"However, there's always a chance Assistant could accidentally start recording snippets of conversations and therefore potentially sensitive and identifiable information. " - This is why security people want a hardware microphone switch.

The Google Translate app has had this feature for years. Near real time audio, and video translation too! It works very well for many languages but not especially well for Chinese (admittedly a harder problem than Spanish).

When I was in Tokyo a bartender chatted with me for a while using a hand held stand-alone device that did voice (audio without relying on text) two way near-real-time translation.

It worked really well and I was confused I have never seen one before.

The HN title is misleading.

The Wired title says "through" not "on". And the article makes it clear that an internet connection is required.

Surely "on" would mean that no connection to the internet would be needed.

It's interesting that all the positive Google Translate experiences shared here have to do with Chinese and Japanese. In general, my experience with translations of European languages has been abysmal, for anything but the simplest expressions. The resulting expressions are often so ungrammatical that they were basically unintelligible.

I remember a Greek taxi driver who picked me up for a long trip, and seeing the distance, initially assumed I was going to the airport - and asked about it, prompting a flurry of No no nos from me and pointing on a map. He later tried to use Google translate to explain why he had assumed this (Greek to English) , but what came out was so garbled I only understood that he was saying something about distance and airport, prompting another confused flurry of map pointing (he abandoned the hope of explaining the initial confusiom and resigned to just driving...) . It was only minutes later, trying to think about what had happened, that I finally puzzled out what that translation must have meant.

Ah, from the title I thought they figured out how to do it locally on your phone, without being connected to Google. Knowing they are only into making Ad products aka tracking, it would be a shame to get used to such a nice free offering. Thanks but no thanks, I guess us suckers will have to take a few hrs to learn a few of the local language phrases.

It would be great if OCR got to the point where you could just point the phone camera at a sign and have it output 1:1 what is in front of you with translated text, like a magic little window frame. Shit still struggles with parsing PDFs though so I'm not holding out too much hope, though.