The promise, and peril, of digital real-time translation

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, recently announced the launch of real-time translation (RTT) in Google Meet, its popular video communication service.

- Dinesh Narayanan

While text translation has been available for a while and conversation was possible on mobile phones—Apple Translate, for instance—by recording in one and replaying in another language, RTT when 100 people are conversing across the globe on an online communications platform is a leap. Add to it Google Beam, a device capable of rendering immersive 3D videos. The result would be a video conference in 3D with participants talking in their preferred language. The translation reaches listeners in the voice and tone of the speaker making it super realistic. Behind all this is Google's upgraded artificial intelligence-based large language model (LLM) Gemini, whose self-description if you ask it, is, "I am a super-smart computer program that can understand and talk with you".