Universal Translation

This video discussing the concept of a universal translator is pretty cool.

I thought about writing something like this for the Android Developer Challenge just because it sounded fun, but ultimately decided I didn’t have time to do it. It shouldn’t be too hard – Cupcake already supports speech-to-text, Donut supports text-to-speech (and in the meantime, there are libraries like this one), and the Google Translate API is available to do the heavy lifting.

Obviously, implementing something like this on a mobile phone with out of the box technologies poses some issues, but the basic idea is cool, it’d be fun to play with, and it would come in handy in lots of situations. Hopefully someone with the time to work on it will put it together – I’d like to see how well it works.