International Communication - just a cool video

Forget learning languages.
In fact, you might as well forget those languages you know already.
Except for English... don't forget English, because you won't be able to read my blog.

Ok so why am I telling you that languages aren't important? Well they are important for the time being, but in a few years things might change. I'm going to link a video to show you how.

The video (below) is a presentation from Microsoft on translation technology. It is linked form 6:15; before that he's just talking about how cool the speech recognition software is and how great Bing Translator is (I've never used it and I don't think any of you have either).

You should definitely watch the video until 7:33. Up to that point you can see that the speech recognition system is pretty good, only a few errors slip in. Maybe in the Chinese text those errors look really stupid, but you know.. they probably get the message.

What happens at 7:33 is really cool. Check it out:

http://youtu.be/Nu-nlQqFCKg?t=6m15s

In case your YouTube isn't working, I'll tell you what happened: The guy was talking in English and we could hear his voice saying the same thing in Chinese.

I think there are a few really cool things about this:
1) We get an almost instant translation.
2) We hear it in his voice.

Number 1 isn't really a huge breakthrough... in fact number 2 isn't such tremendous breakthrough either. But just experiencing the whole thing - a guy talking in his mother tongue and a chosen language at the same time - it's cool.

And it gives way to great future technologies and opportunities. While talking to a foreigner, forget reading the translation on some kind of cool Google Glasses - you're going to hear it from your little earpiece - in his/her voice!

I think that's really great because you can speak to a group of foreigners and hear a translation and know who said what, because each translation is in a different voice.

Plus I think it's a great step towards making communication better - which I think is essential to human development.