Walt Mosspuppet: Tech News and Opinion

There’s a whole lot of buzz right now about Google’s recently announced plans for a “revolutionary” new speech-to-speech translation service, which would essentially let you say whatever you want to, in any language, and be understood by anyone else in any language:

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.”

You might be wondering why I put quotes around “revolutionary” above. I’ll tell you why: Google’s not doing anything original here! Efficient speech-to-speech translation has been around since Gene Roddenberry invented it in 1952! His system didn’t require a cell phone, either: it could fit into your ear, like some sort of wonderful parasite. You’ve probably not heard of this miraculous invention before, because while Roddenberry was great at inventing things, he was terrible at selling them. He even created a TV show called Star Treks, which featured a spaceship crew of the far future saving the galaxy using the translator, as a sales tool for it. Luckily for Roddenberry, Star Treks was more popular than his translator (Slogan: “Can you hear me now?”), staying on the air for an impressive two seasons; otherwise he would have died penniless and alone, never having earned the respect of any of his peers, just like Alexander Graham Bell.

Way to steal a hippie’s intellectual property, Eric Schmidt.

Shut up.