

Ask HN: Live translation via Siri + Google Translate? -  kingkawn

Dear HN; does anyone know if there have been any efforts to combine Siri&#x27;s voice recognition technology with google translate to allow live on the spot translation to any available language which Siri could then read back aloud?   How has this problem been addressed, and how could it be implemented given the inherent difficulty of combining technology from apple and google? 
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mcintyre1994
Hmm, is there any reason to use Siri over Google's own voice recognition/text
to speech stacks?  I really doubt there's any significant difference between
them in that regard at this point. 

I don't think this is a problem worth attempting for anyone except Google at
this point - they're pretty much there.  Translate has a conversation mode, you
choose the languages, and tap which language you're speaking in, it translates
to + speaks in the other pretty much instantly.  They've just added always
listening to the Nexus 5's home screen and to Google Now. 

Putting those two together, they pretty much have this working - 'just' add
always listening to conversation mode for hardware that will support it (Siri
can't do this by the way as far as I know), and then detect which language is
being spoken (I suspect Google already have algorithms to get a language for
webpages) and translate+speak back as normal. 

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kingkawn
oh cool i didn't realize that translate had that capacity, but what you're
talking about is a really elegant solution.  thank you.