Google unveiled today a new capability coming to Google Translate for Android that will enable the app to transcribe live audio in real time. The upcoming feature has been demonstrated at Google's San Francisco office as part of a series of artificial intelligence-related events.
The tool will work by translating a speech as it is being recorded by a user in another language. It is still a prototype feature for now and it may only function online initially. That's in contrast to the offline translation capability of Google Translate, which received improvements late last year. That feature gained up to 12% more accuracy on an average for 59 languages and over 20% for Japanese, Korean, and Polish.
It is worth noting, perhaps, that this feature will work only with live audio captured by a smartphone mic, which means it won't transcribe audio files. However, Google notes that users can play recorded audio and record it using a smartphone's mic for the live transcription to work. With the new capability, Google Translate will work to assess an entire sentence as the audio is being captured in order to correct it for punctuations and word choices. In addition, the tool will also fix accents and regional dialects.
Google acknowledges that the feature may not produce perfect transcriptions, although it assures users that its artificial intelligence models will gain significant improvements over time. That said, there's no word yet on when the feature will be rolled out to Google Translate.
Source: The Verge
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