Google Has Ambitious Plans To Tear Down The Language Barrier
Spiegel reports on some ambitious new plans for the Google Translate team to develop a voice-enabled universal translator. Just like something from "Star Trek" or "Hitchhiker's Guide", the finished product would let you speak your phrase in your native language before the device translates it and speaks it in another language.
BGR calls attention to the fact that the Google Translate team doesn't actually make use of linguists to improve its functionality: "Instead, the Translate app is simply designed to get better with experience. Since Google's specialty is collecting, sorting an analyzing data, the Translate algorithms aren't designed to understand grammatical rules. Rather, as Spiegel puts it, they 'search through the clutter, gather data and learn along the way.'"