
Google Assistant Can Now Translate Languages on Your Phone - jonbaer
https://www.wired.com/story/google-assistant-can-now-translate-on-your-phone/
======
steelframe
I recently vacationed in Japan, and I found that using Google Translate on the
phone wasn't practical because the other person would have no clue what was
going on or how they are supposed to work with the app. The language auto-
detect was abysmal; half the time it thought Japanese was English. They would
start responding to the translated statement before the app played the chime,
and I'd have to rudely interrupt them and fumble with the app to get it to
start listening again. They were never sure when it was "okay" to start
talking again.

In the end I tended to communicate everything I really needed by holding up
the number of things I wanted on my fingers and pointing and smiling, caveman-
style. They would usually know just enough English to say, "Two? Ok." Then the
price of whatever I was buying would show up on the register surrounded by
mystery Japanese characters, but the numbers were Western Arabic, so that was
all I needed to know.

One thing I learned is that you can get by with very little knowledge of the
local language to successfully travel and eat.

~~~
missosoup
I had the opposite experience. Everyone I tried to communicate with via google
translate responded positively except one disgruntled train station attendant.

I would say excuse me, I don't speak Japanese can you please help me. And then
I'd show them my phone with the translated version of whatever my query is and
then press the mic button and they'd get the point that they can speak now.
Worked great.

~~~
ubercow13
You can also enable the appropriate keyboard on your phone before travelling.
Most people can type in their native language on a smartphone.

In my experience many people already have their own translation app on their
phone which they are often happy to use to reply to you, too.

~~~
Thorrez
Yeah, but most people are faster at talking than at typing on a smartphone.

~~~
ubercow13
In my experience the whole thing works better with people typing. Firstly
voice recognition isn’t perfect. The person has to check what they say was
transcribed correctly and can’t correct it with a keyboard if they see it’s
wrong the first time, they have to just try again.

Typing means people go a bit more slowly and think about what they are
writing, sometimes reworking sentences to be clearer.

Also if they are typing in front of your face, the translation constantly
updates based on the partial sentence they’ve typed and this can be quite
revealing, which is useful if the final translation isn’t crystal clear.

------
reaperducer
This sort of thing is surprisingly useful.

A couple of weeks ago I was going to Human Resources on the other side of
campus and there was a Chinese family wandering around, obviously lost.

The mother showed me her phone with some Chinese-language map app that I'd
never seen before. It indicted that there was a shopping mall where we were
standing. Obviously, her map app was wrong since the company has been at this
location for 30 years.

But I was able to say to my phone, "Hey, Siri. How to you say 'I'm sorry,
there is no shopping center here.' In Chinese?" And then I held my phone for
her to see while Siri both printed out the translation on the screen and spoke
it to her. I said a few other hopefully helpful phrases to her, but she seemed
happy with my guidance and did lots of smiling and nodding.

(I assume the article is about the Google version of this. I wasn't able to
read the article because Wired popped up so many ads and DIV modals on the
screen that there wasn't any actual story text.)

~~~
stinos
It's useful, but after so many years the state of machine translations and
speech recognition in general is still not exactly reliable. It's like it
doesn't have context or doesn't know how to apply it. I've heard success
stories like this before, experienced them a few times as well, but most of
the times the experience for me is subpar to the point it gets so annoying and
needs so much manual intervention I gave up, thinking I'll just try again in 5
or 10 years and see if it's any beter.

Maybe my accent or pronounciation sucks but I tried getting Siri to write down
text messages about 10 times. Most of the times it was close, but none of the
times the words were 100% correct and in more than 50% of cases that led to
the produced sentences not conveying the original meaning. Same for
navigation. Names of cities (in Europe) seem problematic, like confusing
Miltenberg (DE) with Milton in Canada or so. Similar for Google Translate. Our
Portugese taxi driver didn't speak English and was worried about getting us to
the airport in time. His phone showed us he was worried about the weather. I
get 'tempo' can mean both, but it's these subtle differences technology still
is lacking.

~~~
trianglem
Might be your accent. I use Siri to send text messages all the time while
driving and anecdotally it works very well.

~~~
hansthehorse
My wife's name is Nada. I pronounce it nA-da and siri says nah-da. If I don't
use the siri pronunciation it won't find the contact. Took me a while to
figure out that work around.

~~~
reaperducer
I have a similar problem with my car's native voice recognition. But Siri gets
both the recognition and pronunciation correct. I wish my car had CarPlay.

------
why-oh-why
Isn’t the title wrong? The audio is sent to the server so it’s not “on my
phone.”

This type of translation was already available “on my phone” completely
offline (written, with Google Translate)

I use translation often and I was hoping to finally have an easy way to have a
written conversation, but this still doesn’t show the right keyboard when
picking the language in “Keyboard” mode.

~~~
elcomet
Google assistant runs on the phone, even if the processing doesn't.

~~~
OrgNet
but the processing is the important part

~~~
elcomet
Not really for users. They care about doing the request and seeing the results
on their phones.

~~~
OrgNet
that will change when they figure out the privacy implications

~~~
diffserv
Can you expand on the the privacy implications?

How is this different than picking up the phone and having your convo go
through ATT/Verizon networks? or using your ISP? Both parties can "legally"
work with authorities to wiretap you?

Are you worried that the (training) algorithms that run on your voice somehow
end up leaking your identity? Or are you worried that someone at Google knows
your voice?

Also, not sure if Google has this fact in their ToS but if they do, what is
the issue?

~~~
klyrs
Phone networks are not primarily advertising agencies, and they're regulated
as utilities, so the difference is nontrivial.

And the personalized risk isn't from random strangers knowing your voice --
it's your stalker ex, or other bad actors, who might get way more insight into
your life than you want

------
OldGuyInTheClub
I saw this video before its public release circa 1993. Autotranslation,
virtual agents, realtime video conferencing on handheld devices, virtual
reality... all there. I was finishing my postdoc at Bell Labs where it was
shown to us as a glimpse into the company's future plans. I didn't know where
the bandwidth would come from and neither did the presenter when I asked
except to say that "It will have to be built, won't it?." Needless to say I
didn't have the foresight to invest in it, either

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFWCoeZjx8A&feature=emb_logo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFWCoeZjx8A&feature=emb_logo)

"AT&T's vision of the future, circa 1993 - AT&T Archives"

~~~
rcpt
2min in and you can see they also predicted NIMBYs

~~~
OldGuyInTheClub
Oh, we've been around a lot longer than that.

------
jph
"However, there's always a chance Assistant could accidentally start recording
snippets of conversations and therefore potentially sensitive and identifiable
information. " \- This is why security people want a hardware microphone
switch.

~~~
s3r3nity
Funny enough, Facebook added one for both the camera and microphone on Portal.

~~~
ma2rten
Alexa and Google Home have them too.

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jzwinck
The Google Translate app has had this feature for years. Near real time audio,
and video translation too! It works very well for many languages but not
especially well for Chinese (admittedly a harder problem than Spanish).

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whiddershins
When I was in Tokyo a bartender chatted with me for a while using a hand held
stand-alone device that did voice (audio without relying on text) two way
near-real-time translation.

It worked really well and I was confused I have never seen one before.

------
kwhitefoot
The HN title is misleading.

The Wired title says "through" not "on". And the article makes it clear that
an internet connection is required.

Surely "on" would mean that no connection to the internet would be needed.

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tsimionescu
It's interesting that all the positive Google Translate experiences shared
here have to do with Chinese and Japanese. In general, my experience with
translations of European languages has been abysmal, for anything but the
simplest expressions. The resulting expressions are often so ungrammatical
that they were basically unintelligible.

I remember a Greek taxi driver who picked me up for a long trip, and seeing
the distance, initially assumed I was going to the airport - and asked about
it, prompting a flurry of No no nos from me and pointing on a map. He later
tried to use Google translate to explain why he had assumed this (Greek to
English) , but what came out was so garbled I only understood that he was
saying something about distance and airport, prompting another confused flurry
of map pointing (he abandoned the hope of explaining the initial confusiom and
resigned to just driving...) . It was only minutes later, trying to think
about what had happened, that I finally puzzled out what that translation must
have meant.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
For translations where one side is not English, Google Translate does a
horrible job, because it will incorrectly translate to English first, then
incorrectly translate from English to the target language. This means you end
up with translation errors only comprehensible to someone who speaks all three
languages!

But even without that, even for what should be simple translations from
English to e.g. Swedish, it makes so many nonsensical errors. Not just
misunderstanding context, but fabricating novel and absurd translations of
common words.

I think it's gotten worse since they switched to their whole-sentence neural
net system. At least in the past, the individual words made some sense, and
you could click on them individually to see other (sometimes more accurate)
alternatives.

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forgetfulusr
Ah, from the title I thought they figured out how to do it locally on your
phone, without being connected to Google. Knowing they are only into making Ad
products aka tracking, it would be a shame to get used to such a nice free
offering. Thanks but no thanks, I guess us suckers will have to take a few hrs
to learn a few of the local language phrases.

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asdff
It would be great if OCR got to the point where you could just point the phone
camera at a sign and have it output 1:1 what is in front of you with
translated text, like a magic little window frame. Shit still struggles with
parsing PDFs though so I'm not holding out too much hope, though.

~~~
dreamcompiler
The Google Translate app does exactly that in its camera mode, and has been
doing so for at least 3 years.

