Google Translate’s Conversation Mode Now in Experimental Public Testing

by Quentyn Kennemer on January 12th, 2011 at 2:34 pm

Google’s finally unwrapping Conversation Mode – an innovative function of their Translate web app that will allow you and another speaker to talk as it listens in and translates your conversation on the fly. Spanish and English are the only two languages supported to start, and just as we were warned about before, it isn’t the most perfect implementation. That’s fine considering no one else is doing this. The app has also gotten a nice visual overhaul. The updated version can now be found in the Android market. NOTE: This feature is not available for Google Translate’s mobile site.


Google Translate

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Use Google Translate to instantly translate text between more than 50 languages.Featuring:* Dictionary results * Text-to-speech * Voice input * R... Read More

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Developed by Google Inc.

  • perfect driver

    For some reason I’m trying to figure out how to make it work right .. for example when switching the keyboard from English to Spanish, isn’t the spell check & voice recognition supposed to automatically switch to Spanish as well? For some reason it’s not working that way :(

  • http://www.soundcloud.com/drd525 drd505

    Wenn es zwischen Deutsch und Englisch uebersetzen kann, dann wuerde ich es benutzen.

  • dakuten

    It switches, but, as many european americanised languages, el español (tout comme le français) sadly uses many many english words !

  • Jarl

    this wont work unless the translation can auto-sense the context. i worked for a company that tried the same, 10 years ago, and they failed.

  • http://www.mensahwatts.com MensahWatts

    Cool…I hope they also spiff up the over all app when it comes too translating…sure needs some work.

  • Elmer Wabbit

    Drd505,
    It sucks that America ignores other languages except for Mexican “Spanish”

  • Chuck

    Hey Elmer.. Spanish is hardly ‘Mexican’..it originated in Castille region in Spain, and it is spoken throughout Latin America, Spain and some regions of the Phillipines.. could you tone down your Xenophobism?

  • Matt

    Chuck, I think you are the one who misunderstood Elmer’s intent. He was differentiating Mexican Spanish from the Spanish used throughout Spain (which it in itself uses several variants) and the Spanish primarily taught in U.S. schools, re: Mexian Spanish due to the geographic location. He is implying that American’s do not care about European Spanish, Indonesian, Greek or any other language other than that of our southern neighbor.

  • http://www.her-libido.com spanish fly

    how can it translate spanish fly?

  • TMC

    This will be a cool application for mobile android devices… especially on the go.. in a car (say… Ford?).
    Speech to text and/or text to speech will be a great application in the future once it’s fine tuned. Programmers at least have a leg-up over the speak-n-spell database approach from 25 years ago.



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