In today's world, people want the newest technology in an expeditious manner, and the first company to provide that service, wins. Google thrives in this competitive environment; they are today's Microsoft. They know what the public wants, often when the public doesn't know itself. Google's new translation technology can translate a spoken sentence into a synthesized voice in a different language. Translation software has been around for a while, but the people who use these translators know that they're best suited for vocabulary. When the software has the task of translating meaning or grammar, sentences can come out anywhere from ambiguous to laughable. Getting an spoken, intelligible, foreign response was unthinkable until Google thought of it. That's what it takes to flourish in the world of computing: coming up with unprecedented ideas and marketing those ideas first.
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ReplyDeleteGoogle also has a way of mingling existing technologies to make it more useful and fun. Recently, I came across an app from Google called "Google Goggles" (for Android platform). One can open up the app and take a picture of a sudoku game. The app will recognize that it is sudoku. It will prompt if you want to solve it. You say yes, and boom, it's solved. Now, the algorithm for solving sudoku probably already existed and the image recognition technology also, most likely, already existed. But when put together, it makes the result so much cooler.