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Language lessons may be a thing of the past if Google cracks the live voice translation technology it admits it's been working on.
The company would combine its advanced voice recognition know-how with its text translation service to create a mobile phone that acts as an instant interpreter.
'We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time,' says head of translation services Franz Och.
'Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we're working on.'
Google says one of the biggest challenges will be coping with accents.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Mr Och said: 'Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch but recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you.
'The phone should get a feel for your voice from past voice search queries, for example.'
