With everything going on in the world lately, it can be hard to keep up with it all. Google News can be great help there, with the app supporting features like curated stories, daily briefings, and a dark theme. Google even added support for displaying content in two languages together within the feed last year. But it's not all good news, because the in-app translation feature is currently borked.
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The ways we experience media on the web tend to be designed only for the publisher's intended medium. You don't consume videos just for their sound, for example, and podcasts don't often come with word-for-word transcripts, but there are ways of enjoying those pieces of content with augmentation. Some of the toughest challenges in making text sites cross-consumable via dictation has been in naturalizing machine voices and translating stories rich in grammatical tapestry from other languages. Google Assistant is now bringing its answers to those challenges with new text-to-speech functionality available today.
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Back in 2011, Google Translate made it easier to interpret live discussions thanks to Conversation mode. The app also got a fresh coat of paint more recently, making it easier to summon it. In parallel, Assistant-enabled speakers got the ability to translate live conversations in April, which essentially turned them into digital interpreters. Unfortunately, the functionality was exclusive to smart speakers and displays and wasn't available on phones until now. Google just released the feature on mobile devices as well, making it easier to have a conversation with someone who speaks a different language on the go.
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How do you pronounce quokka? Pronunciation can be difficult to perfect, especially with a language containing as many silly, varied rules as English. Practice, though, helps solidify a skill. Google has provided pronunciation guides since April of this year. Now, they'll also give you the chance to vocally practice your pronunciation of American English, and, "soon," Spanish.
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Interpreting and translating live speech is much trickier than simply processing written text. Indeed, unlike human brains, machines would typically need to go through three separate phases to convert oral communication from one language to another. Initially, speech would need to be interpreted by the machine and transcribed into text, which would then be translated into the target dialect, before being fed into a text-to-speech engine to be spoken out loud. Although this cascaded process is transparent for the user and relatively fast, Google is working on a more natural speech-to-speech method it called Translatotron, which doesn't need intermediate processing for translation.
Translation is tricky, as you know if you've read any web page automatically converted by Google Translate; different tongues have different nuances that are hard to teach to an algorithm. Specifically, the way languages handle gender varies, and these discrepancies previously led to Google Translate to make assumptions and provide potentially inaccurate translations. Now, though, when gender is ambiguous in a translation input, the output will show both masculine and feminine terms, eliminating the guesswork.
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Text translation seems like an obvious feature for a phone keyboard. It eliminates the hassle of having to swap between apps, copying and pasting when you want to say something in a language you don't speak (however infrequent that need may be). SwiftKey seems to agree, as the latest update of the keyboard's Beta version comes with Microsoft Translator integration.
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Intrigued by the functionality of Google's Pixel Buds, but unconvinced by the form factor? LG's got you. The Korean manufacturer has announced two new additions to its collar-style Tone line of in-ear headphones: the Ultra SE, which features an external speaker, and the Platinum SE, which has Google Assistant functionality, including Pixel Buds-style real-time translation, built in.
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It's Friday afternoon and that means there's probably going to be a Google app update. The latest version doesn't appear to change much on the surface, so we'll be looking to the teardown for more information. Details are a bit thin with this update as most of the topics are little more than breadcrumbs, but we'll take a look at a new feature called the Memory Aid Locker, the first substantial pieces of a Top Apps view, and a cut-and-dry implementation of Google Translate for smart displays.
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Facebook kicked off its F8 2018 conference in San Jose on Tuesday by announcing a dating service and privacy improvements, but numerous changes are coming to Messenger, too. Messenger will get support for integrated augmented reality experiences as well as Marketplace language translation, and Facebook says users can also look forward to a simpler design that does away with the clutter.
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