Google, startup Ortsbo bring 'Star Trek'-like translation to smartphones

After more than two decades of technology and investment by corporations, universities and the government, machine-based speech recognition and language translation, while all in all in its infancy, has made significant headway. For the first time, the research has reached the point where it is good enough for real-world commercial products.

More basic form of machine translation

Ortsbo offers a more basic form of machine translation, based on text, in other words attracting millions of users in its first few months of operation. The new service, a unit of Toronto-based Intertainment Media, offers real-time text translation in more than 50 languages for Instant Message networks including Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and Tencent QQ, the most popular IM network in China.

Then there is Google. Leveraging its vast computing power, the Mountain View Internet giant recently rolled out updates to its Google Translate apps for the iPhone and Android smartphones that offer limited speech translation between languages. During it's not quite Star Trek's universal translator, an experimental feature of the Android app even translates real-time spoken conversation between English and Spanish.

Google, which as well offers a software extension to its Chrome browser that translates documents, has a powerful business incentive for translation. Only a small share of Internet content is in some of the world's most commonly spoken languages, like Arabic or Hindi. If Google can give speakers of those languages access to the large volume of online content written in English, for instance, it can gain a huge audience, and the revenue that comes with it.

Google's cloud network of distributed servers, which may be the world's largest computer network, can host millions of simultaneous translations. Ortsbo, which seven months afterwards its launch already has a traffic volume it didn't expect until 2013, is racing to build a global cloud computing network to handle the flood of chatter from China, Taiwan, South Korea and Brazil, as then as from the U.S.

The real emerging markets come to life

"You're seeing the real emerging markets come to life, and the networks that go with them," said David Lucatch, president of Toronto-based Ortsbo, which has more than 5.1 million users, a 27 percent jump since January. Lucatch says Ortsbo's online traffic is growing faster than Facebook in its first year because he's making social networks bigger, by allowing members who lacked a common language to chat.

Ortsbo -- www.ortsbo.com -- runs on 12 instant message networks, including Facebook Chat, Twitter, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and large Chinese networks like Tencent's QQ. The service is far from perfect: It can take the app more than 10 minutes to load onto your PC or Mac, and the machine-powered text translations regularly make the literal translation errors to which computers are prone, struggling with such colloquial expressions as "the best of two worlds."

The Google Translate app

The Google Translate app, in the meantime, allows users to speak or type a phrase into their phone and have it be translated into any one of more than 50 languages, some audible and some in text only. The iPhone app can "speak" translations in a synthesized voice in 23 different languages. The Android version has an experimental "conversation mode" for English and Spanish, a feature that combines speech recognition and language translation. Two people who spoke just Spanish or English could hold a phone between them, allow it to record a phrase in one language, send it to Google's cloud network for translation, and "speak" it back in the other language -- all in a few seconds. Microsoft as well has a translation app that runs on its Windows Phone 7 platform.

"If I'm traveling to a foreign country, and I want to be able to ask, 'Where is the bathroom?' I'm pretty confident this app can do this," Chiang said. "Now if I want to negotiate a business deal, I think we probably have some way to go."