George Lucas’s dream has come true
Google has once again improved the capabilities of its translation algorithm, and, judging by this video, it’s quite impressive. We soon won’t need to learn a foreign language anymore, since the AI will do it for you.
This is very practical for those who are ‘language handicapped,’ like me, for whom hours of work, listening, exercises, and practice at best only result in a French accent like Jean Dujardin, and still leave me incapable of having a conversation with Dutch tourists wandering around my city.
Translation into more than 70 languages
The application presented here thus translates a conversation in real-time, and does so in more than 70 languages. It can even be used in a noisy environment and remain effective. And according to Google, nuances of tone are also now better taken into account. One can still sense a slight latency, but the speed seems as fast, or even faster, than an interpreter. Just as AI could save spelling, it could very well save foreign languages too.
Multiple uses
The progress in this field is impressive and will continue to be so. The use cases will be infinite: real-time listening to a foreign language podcast, commercial exchanges in the professional world, tourism, etc. We can only be stunned by what is happening right now, and the scene in Star Wars where C-3PO boasted of being able to speak more than ‘6 million forms of communication’ is no longer science fiction. That was in 1977, nearly 50 years ago, and I’m not sure George Lucas, its director, thought it could happen in his lifetime.
