Language lessons may be a thing of the past if Google cracks the live voice translation technology it admits it's been working on.
 
Google wants to develop its smartphone technology to translate speech

The company would combine its advanced voice recognition know-how with its text translation service to create a mobile phone that acts as an instant interpreter.

Head of translation services Franz Och said: "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time.

"Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we're working on."

Google says one of the biggest challenges will be coping with accents.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, Mr Och said: "Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch but recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you.

"The phone should get a feel for your voice from past voice search queries, for example."

Source: Hannah Thomas-Peter, Sky News Online