Soon, software for mobiles that translates foreign languages instantly

London, Feb 7 (ANI): It may soon be possible to transform communication among speakers of the world's 6,000-plus languages - all thanks to Google which is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages instantly.

A basic system will be ready in couple of years, as Google is building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, reports The Times.

An automatic system for translating text on computers has already been created by the giant.

Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in.

It is now working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller's voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language.

"We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time," said Franz Och, Google's head of translation services.

"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.

"If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently." (ANI)