Saturday, October 23, 2010

Where is my iTranslate App?

Now we have the Dragon dictation app and music recognition for the iPod it's only a matter of time until somebody comes up with a proper universal translator: just let your iPod pick up something in a foreign language, it will interpret it and dig up from some obscure cloud database the translation into any language you want.

Obviously the cloud needs to be populated by translation logic that makes sense (i.e. not translate every single word literally). The recognition logic would have to be quite elaborate to do cross-reference between different languages (you might not know the speaker's language). And perhaps it needs to account for context too, the longer the soundbite, the better the translation can pick up nuances, or transliterate common phrases. The app might use the GPS locator to account for local differences in speech (e.g. dialects).

So where is this app? Is it here already? Can I take it on vacation to Japan?

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