Google is working on a phone that can translate live speech. It will be the first of its kind, and the internet giant says it could be available within a few years.

Google has already made headlines for its translation technology recently, with Google Translate, a real-time online translation tool, launched late last year.

The new device will combine the translational ability of Google Translate with voice recognition technology to interpret actual speech in real time.

It has been compared to Babel Fish, the fictional creature from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by sci-fi writer Douglas Adams. The yellow creature could interpret any foreign language instantly when placed into the ear of the user.

"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," Franz Och, Head of Translation Services at Google, told The Times (London).

"Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch but recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you. The phone should get a feel for your voice from past voice search queries, for example."

Linguists are cautious, however. Professor David Crystal of Bangor University, Wales, said that "the problem with speech recognition is the variability in accents. No system at the moment can handle that properly.

"Maybe Google will be able to get there faster than everyone else, but I think it's unlikely we'll have a speech device in the next few years that could handle high-speed Glaswegian slang."

He conceded that the future looked "very interesting," however. He told The Times, "If you have a Babel Fish, the need to learn foreign languages is removed."

08 February 2010