Google to announce its Oral Translate app

Google will soon announce updates to its translation app for phones. Google Translate now offers written translation of 90 languages and the ability to hear spoken translations of a few popular languages. In the update, the app will automatically recognize if someone is speaking a popular language and automatically turn it into written text.

Google says its Translate app has been installed more than 100 million times on Android phones, most of which could receive the upgrade. “We have 500 million active users of Translate every month, across all our platforms,” said Macduff Hughes, the engineering director of Google Translate. With 80 to 90 percent of the web in just 10 languages, he added, translation becomes a critical part of learning for many people.

Automatic translation of web pages into some major languages is already a feature on Google’s Chrome browser. People using the browser can render a page that is in English into, say Korean. There are also 140 languages in which it is possible to change things like Gmail settings.

“ICTnews”