Google Voice brought us a sort of bridge between the Web and voicemail—I’ve been using it for quite some time now—but what we’ve really been itching for is something that’s been hinted at for a while: the ability to translate live speech into other languages. The Voice product already capably transcribed voicemails (although sometimes with funny results) and it made sense that the product could be connected to the Google translator for text.

So, that’s what we’ve got going on now.

The real upgrade that was needed, I think, happened to be the speed at which transcription could happen. We’ve already seen that Google Translate—the text version—is pretty swift, however, voicemails did take several minutes for the system to transcribe. This could become extremely untenable for an actual conversation held over a translator. Spanish and English only right now, but it’s a huge leap forward in practical language technology.

From an article on the subject of the Google Voice Translator from GigaOM,

The conversations mode, which the search giant showed off in September, holds the promise of knocking down language barriers at home and abroad, allowing people to communicate in ways unheard of before. The initial version is limited to English and Spanish but the service should support a wider variety of languages soon. Google warns that the technology is still being developed and may have difficulty in parsing regional accents, background noise and rapid speech. But when it works, it gives people the closest approximation to a Star Trek universal translator. As Google showed in a demo from the IFA show in September, two people can take turns speaking into a phone with their words quickly translated through a robot voice.

The conversations mode highlights new layout designs for the Google Translate app, which is available on Android 2.1 devices and supports text translations between 53 languages. Users can also input text by voice for 15 languages. Translating conversations really showcases the power of mobile devices when connected to cloud-services and highlights the need for fast networks to facilitate these conversations. And perhaps more importantly for Google, it highlights the work it’s done in speech technology, which is increasingly finding a way into Google products.

Did anyone else catch the Star Trek reference? What with the cinematic necessity of making sure that everyone spoke English and thus the technobabble explanation that a computer translates everything for them on the fly—why, who expect that to become a reality? Certainly, it makes more sense that it would be done over the phone and that both parties would come out sounding like a bastardized Stephen Hawking… We have to make some concessions for advancing technology before we can reach the levels of popular science fiction.

Google has a demo for their product right now. If you’re looking forward to this, it’s a good time to go check it out.

This huge upgrade to Google Translate comes on the heels of another Google Android fix up that gave voice the power to control the mobile device. As transcription and voicemail for Google Vocie hit the market we saw it integrated with Google Mail (I expect that this translator may go into that as well, if not already extant) and it even visited the Apple App store. Perhaps this means that Google Translate and it’s conversation mode, although mostly only showing up on the Android, might eventually make its way to the iPhone—either that or Apple might want to get on the ball and do something similar.

Smartphones could be even smarter if they use services such as this in order to bridge the gap between languages for business transactions and not just international pen-pals. Of course, it may be difficult to do away with the concept of lingua franca, especially noting the crude resource that translation offers.

Right now, Google Voice transcription itself has some extremely silly outcomes when it cannot understand what’s being said to it and it’s unlikely that Google Translate itself is all that capable even when it has clear text to work with. Put these two things together and there may be some extremely funny misunderstandings to be had.

Still, all those caveats combined, this is an amazing leap.