Is there anything more disruptive than speech-to-speech translation?
The Sunday Times is reporting about Google's development of a speech-to-speech software for mobile phones. With this app that is said to be available as a basic version in a few years, it will be possible for people to speak to each other on the phone in different languages, with the software translating on the fly. As soon as an application is able to do this kind of work, I assume the system could likely be used for every type of real time translation, for example on TV, in offices or at conferences.
Personally, it's hard to imagine any other kind of software with more disruptive power than speech-to-speech tools with capabilities of translating what's being said by humans in the second it's being said. Suddenly, I could have a face-to-face conversation with people from China, Japan or Russia, with everyone speaking in his/her mother tongue. A totally new era of communication would arise, while language boundaries vanish. Private and business life would (once again) be revolutionized, with a lot of new possibilities and markets emerging for companies and organisations.
Like always there would be a flip side, too. People could become lazy and stop learning foreign languages, since there is no need for spending hundreds of hours on such a tough task when you can use technology to translate dozens or even hundreds of languages on the fly. The dependency on technology would increase, and since learning language always is healthy training for the brain, even negative neurological consequences could be possible.
Still, the concept of speech-to-speech software is fascinating, and it will be up to us to handle it the right way. Now let's wait and see if those "a few years" will eventually turn out to be a decade or more. Seeing today's Google translations from and to German for instance, there is still a very long way to go before automatic translations really can be used for more than rough-and-ready tasks, not to mention for sophisticated human conversation.
