According to The New York Times, Google is soon going to bring real-time translation to its Translate app for Android. Last month, Microsoft’s Skype division had announced a similar program, though it is currently under closed beta.
Post the update, the Translate app will be able to convert spoken sentences of a popular language into text in real-time. The Google Translate app is already capable of doing this, but it has to send the data to the server for the translation, which takes time. The update will make this process almost instantaneous. You are also required to specify the input language, which will not be required post the update.
The engineering director of Google Translate, Macduff Hughes, revealed to NYT that Translate has roughly 500 million active users across all its platforms with the app being installed more than 100 million times on Android devices. The upcoming update will support most of the Android devices out there.
Google had teased the launch of this update way back in 2013 and promised that it would be possible to get delay free and “near perfect” translations, but delayed it for some reason.
Google is also on the verge of announcing a service that will allow you to hold your phone to a street sign in an unknown language and receive its translation right on the screen in no time.
