Google’s translation application for Android recently added more languages. The company is known to have offered text translations and speech-to-text translation for a long time. Still, in January, it took a new step and made an attempt at making speech-to-speech translations from English to Spanish.
With the new update that was released on Thursday, the application can now converse in 14 languages. Besides English and Spanish, it has added Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.
“Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other,” product manager Jeff Chin explained in a post on the company’s blog. “But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.”
Chin pointed out that the application was still an early alpha. Due to the accents and background noise its accuracy is far from stellar.
“But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more,” Chin said. “We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.”
Google also added a feature that allows you to see what the application believes it heard. Therefore you can correct any mistakes.
In addition, the number of languages that are supported for the application’s text and text-to-speech translations keeps on growing. At the moment there are 63 languages supported for text, while speech-to-text has 17 languages and text-to-speech works in 24 languages.
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