Not long ago Google announced new glasses for augmented reality: you look at the world and information is overlaid on the objects you are seeing.

Indeed, at this point it is just a (small) step to imagine that through the glasses part of this information may be used to clarify somebody’ speech, like it my be useful if that somebody is speaking a foreign language.

Translation appears as overlaid text

This is what Will Powell though and set up to do.

He has assembled a system consisting of a computer, a speech recognition software and a real time translator coupled with a pair of glasses that can display the translated sentences as subtitles…

The idea is that you just wear the glasses as you are talking to someone. A microphone embedded in the glasses captures the voice of the person who is talking to you and a computer translates it and the translation appears as a floating text in front of your eyes, like a prompt.

As you can see in the clip below, the system is quite bulky and it won’t be practical to use. But as it happens with all electronic components it just take a little time (and a good market) to have them shrinking to the point the basically disappear and become embedded.

Hence, I can imagine a real pair of normal looking glasses providing this type of service in just 2 to three years.

Think about the world without the language barriers in which you can speak to overseas without the

Babelfish

necessity to care about the mother tongue of the interlocutor. This concept remits to the Babelfish from the Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many efforts have been made by large companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft to bring this scenario to the reality.

IBM started a project in 2001, that was completed in 2004, called The Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR), “The system is the first Speech to Speech system that allows for bidirectional (English-Mandarin) free-form speech input and output“. More recently, Microsoft Research released a demo video about its realtime time translator telephone that works in English and German, the native languages of the two engineers responsible for this project. Google also is working in an Android application for realtime translation that could make any language Lingua Franca.

It is hard to think about accurate translations for the next few years since languages are so unique that you can’t translate something with its literal meaning. Aside the efforts, the average end user is not constantly talking overseas, and personally, this services could generate an invaluable portable translator when you’re on vacation.

Augmented Reality has been created by the military to enhance responsiveness of soldiers, providing them with more information ob the world around them. It then moved to specific industrial area and to surgery.

In the last decade it has started to spread in video games and more recently has leveraged on the features offered by smart phones to hit the mass market. The problem was that the applications available on smart phones were good to create a WOW reaction (because it was something new and surprising) but then there was no practical and seamless use for them.

The situation is rapidly changing and according to the latest report on Augmented Reality published by Forrester, “Mobile Augmented Reality: beyond the Hyphe, a glimpse into the mobile future”

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/mobile_augmented_reality/q/id/58142/t/2

This year there are going to be a number of applications that will change our perception of Augmented Reality, transforming it from a WOW to “I don’t even think about it, I just use it!”.

Look at a sign in New York and get it translation overlapping it

Take as an example the App Word Lens, made available last December on the Apple Store.  You point your cell phone to a sign on the road and looking through your cell phone screen you see the same image but with the wording on the sign translated to your language: cool!

What impress me is not the “cool” part but the seamless sensation. After using it for just a few times it gets part of your habit. Unfortunately, so far, it only provides translation between English and Spanish but I see no reason to have a Chinese or Japanese translation available. And the I would run for it!

In the April 18^th post,

 http://www.blog.telecomfuturecentre.it/2010/04/18/doesn%e2%80%99t-matter-what-language-you-speak-as-long-as-you-use-a-cell-phone/ ,

I discussed the level of accuracy achieved by Google in translating languages and suggested that they may be coming to a good real time translation through the cell phone by 2012.

Well, we are still two years away, but I can see the first steps being taken: on May 6^th Google has announced an application running on Android phones allowing you to get an immediate translation of a word or a sentence captured through the camera of the phone.

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/translate-real-world-with-google.html

Point and Shoot. Then identify the sentence you need translated and..le voilà!

You can use it to translate from English, Spanish, French, German and Italian into 52 languages. Not quite the real time translation of speech but we are not in 2012 either!