The tech world is kind of buzzing right now about a Google app available on Android phones. It’s the latest version of Google Translate, a program that translates speech into other languages. But the new version has a “Conversation” setting. So you can be with someone where neither of you speak the other’s language. You speak in English, your phone repeats it back in Spanish. Your friend speaks in Spanish, the phone speaks back to you in English. Google says it’s still in Alpha testing, not even to Beta yet. It’s still kind of buggy and it only works for English and Spanish so far. But that’s a matter of debugging and improving. The technology is here.
Can you imagine going to Africa or Mongolia or South America, somewhere no one speaks English, and being able to really talk with people there using only your phone? That’s our new world, folks.
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