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by Vinkekatten 3417 days ago
Google Translate has been improved immensely just in the past six months or so, through neural networking and machine learning [0]. It's become MUCH better at translating full sentences and coherent text - in some cases it's hard to differentiate from a competent human translation. They have made great improvements to both speech recognition [1] and text-to-speech[2] as well. It feels so damn sci-fi to just pull up a phone, talk into it and have it repeat what you said in japanese or spanish.

Siri is still mostly useful as a kitchen timer though.

[0] https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-mor...

[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/SpeechProcessing.html

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12860866/google-deepmind-wa...