[softdev12]

I'm curious on what the uptake of this product will be. The tricky thing with voice translation seems to be the high errors due to both first recognizing the speech and then the errors in translating the recognition. It's seem that it will be really difficult to get translation near the quality of pure text translation, that only has 1 step. I'm not sure that users will tolerate any grievous mis-translations. We'll see.

[andyjdavis]

> It's seem that it will be really difficult to get translation near the quality of pure text translation

I am fairly suspicious of this new product given that text translation is not exactly a solved problem. My wife and I travel a great deal so we have plenty of opportunities to use google translate in particular.

Currently we are in Spain and translate emails to and from the person who owns the apartment we are staying in. The understandability of the translations is pretty variable. One or two typos seems to be all it takes to see it produce something unintelligible. Also, the locals in the area we are in frequently speak both Spanish and Catalan. I suspect our landlord may be throwing in the occasional Catalan word because some words (that looks Spanish to me) go untranslated or are translated to something nonsensical.

Every email of a few paragraphs requires five minutes of my wife and I sitting with both the original message and the google translation in front of us deciphering them. Occasionally we have to bounce "was this what you meant?" emails back and forth with our landlord.

So yeah, unless their text translation is much much better than google translate, if they are going to layer speech recognition on top of that, good luck to them.

[rbshadel]

I think especially at the early stages it will depend on use case. For something like business meetings/transactions I would certainly not tolerate grievous mis-translations. However, I would happily tolerate some mis-translations if this allowed me to speak with my great-grandmother (I only speak English, she only speaks Albanian). It would be annoying certainly, but well worth it, especially if my mother and/or grandmother were around to correct any odd translations. I'm sure it will take awhile for this type of software to be usable in professional settings, but for more casual applications, bring it on!