Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone

googleblog.blogspot.com

100 pointsatularora22 comments

I find it insane that we've come to a point when speaking to a machine gives you the ability to translate what you just said to a different language immediately. Sure, the pieces were all out there already, but the combination of all of them in one package is non-trivial. We've come a long way.

Much like Louis C.K. would say about flying: "people complain about not having wifi on a plane, but they're flying through the air, sitting in a f*cking chair"

"You're sitting in a chair. IN THE SKY!" and paraphrasing... "Are you not amazed you're partaking in the miracle of human flight, you non-contibuting ZERO?"

This is ridiculously awesome. I have had a lot of fun hacking the google translate API before, but this wraps everything up in a sweet interface.

But it's too bad that Google is strapping everybody down to their services like this. The Google API shuts you down after too many requests per second. For this stuff to really take off what we need is this technology to be build right into the web browser, and have a JavaScript API for control over the translation and TTS engine.

I think it's cool. I played with it for Android (not the voice input, but the text based input and the voice output). I was with a Russian and Turkish colleague (I speak American English). We found that the translation was pretty good--but that the speech synthesis was pretty bad for both Turkish and Russian. Has anyone checked it out for Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish?

I just tried it for Dutch, and it got one out of the ten 5-word sentences I tried, correct. Some sentences only got one word right, and I sure was articulating like they do on national television ;) They just got a much greater sample size for English, matter of time for the rest of the languages I hope.

"... and I sure was articulating like they do on national television" Not sure what they trained their algorithm on, but this articulation might have been the culprit. If they have a corpus of "normal people" speaking Dutch, and then you go and articulate, you will get poor results.

I've tried certain phrases in Chinese and I'm not sure if it's my accent or what but it can't seem to recognize the word "河蟹" (river crab). Incidentally, it's also Chinese Internet slang for harmonizing/censorship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_crab_(Internet_slang)

I tried it with a friend that knew german and it didn't work that well on Android. He wasn't a native speaker though.

So, you do realize that once you can fit something like this in your ear you have a bona-fide Star Trek universal translator.

Couple it with a tablet, load up wikipedia and you're ready to beam aboard any passing Vogon spaceship.

I'd recommend bringing a solar powered battery charger (who solar powered? because you can run it off nearly any light source, including artificial lighting, which is more likely than trying to find a source of electrical power that's compatible with your charger).

Bluetooth headset?

I'm not sure about the iPhone, but a lot of tasks on Android can be done with (albeit still inaccurate in my experience) voice control. Combine that with a text-to-speech program, and you can theoretically use most of your smartphone's functions without having to even touch the thing.

</rambling>

The speak feature really would have came in handy when I was in China for the big earthquake in 2008. I thought I'd be ahead of the game and use g-translate to pre-save some fullscreen images of phrases I wanted to use while I was there. My favorite loss in translation moment was when I tried asking a Monk if I may please take his picture, only to find out I was asking him if I might take all of his personal pictures.

My own experience with the app on Android would have me warn you that speech recognition is sub-par. English generally works, but it is sketchy. Spanish didn't work with me; I thought maybe it was my non-native accent, yet it managed to fair worse when I had some native speakers try it. It couldn't catch even basic phrases no matter how many times tried.

I find it amusing that google has an application that can translate from language to language yet when I call <insert big name company>'s automated system they cannot decipher what I am saying worth a damn.

If the Google system is anything like the Youtube auto-transcribe feature or the voicemail to text system, it can't really decipher what people are saying worth a damn either. ;)

Any idea if 'speak to translate' will be coming to the API? http://code.google.com/apis/language/translate/overview.html

Well, I exhausted my knowledge of Korean phrases by trying the (phonetic) phrase "Anyong haseyo". I am as far from a native speaker as one can be.

I can't even describe how cool it was to see:

Hi 안녕하세요

does this have the same functionality that the Android version had for a month or so? It is still pretty amazing.

Google Translate app, please translate this for me to RoR:

"1,000,000 page views in 24 hours."

The star, listen and fullscreen buttons look awfully small

This is freaking awesome. Now all we need are sane roaming agreements between carriers so we can actually use our iphones overseas ..

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