Google Translate now with real-time audio translation

Such a thing is useless without half-decent translation. Google Translate, as far as I know, currently uses a phrase-based statistical model which is beyond terrible: it isn't aware of context or grammar. It's basically operating on the theory that if you stuff enough training data into a bad model, it'll magically stop being bad.<p>You're lucky if you can even <i>understand</i> the output of a Google translation from Chinese or Japanese, let alone the translation being correct. Among machine translators, it's widely considered to be one of the worst in existence (e.g. see the "Translation Experiment" at <a href="http://amaterasu.is.moelicious.be/blog/?p=771" rel="nofollow">http://amaterasu.is.moelicious.be/blog/?p=771</a>).<p>Rules-based translators with vastly less training data than Google's tend to give far better results... and even then, they tend to be wrong constantly: <i>"As you can see, four of the seven lines in this edited machine translation are almost the complete opposite of what the Japanese actually meant."</i>

Ok but, the speech to text ability really sucks right now. I use google voice, and the transcriptions are ALWAYS mangled.<p>So you have the transcription, which sucks right now. Almost unusable.<p>Then you have the translation which can be okay depending on how simple the phrase is. So you're going to inputting a garbage transcription into a dubious translation engine.<p>Then you can output the voice, which I know works well now, great.<p>But the other pieces doesn't seem to be good enough yet in real world situations.

This is some serious Star Trek stuff.<p>Or maybe the TV show "Timecop" (I think that's the one), where the protagonist, using little more than his wits and a handheld credit card computer kept chrononaut baddies from altering the past. Considering how close my phone is to the size of a credit card, we may be less than a decade away from that kind of thing.