17 May 2006
Google Press Day
It was the Google Press Day 2006 last Wednesday. I probably should have blogged about this then.
Anyway, forget about the four new releases, the most exciting part of the webcast was when Sergey Brin (namesake of Google Brin Creator) answered my question about their plans for their statistical machine translation system around 03:32:45 into the webcast.
Tony Ruscoe asked:
Does Google have any plans in the near future to integrate their statistical machine translation system with services such as Google News, Gmail, Google Talk and even Google Search?
Sergey Brin replied:
We actually – for those of you who haven’t heard – we actually developed a statistical machine translation system that won a number of awards last year and came in first on Chinese/English translation as well as Arabic/English translation. And we’re very excited about it. We’d certainly love to get that launched into our products, and we’re working on it.
It was really developed to be as good as possible in terms of the quality of the translation, not as “productionizable” as possible. So, I know it seems trivial, but it would actually take some work to make that happen. But we’re committed to doing it and I believe we will succeed.
No real surprises there then. Although it possibly sounds like Google may be waiting for Moore’s law to kick in before they integrate their statistical machine translation system with more of their services.
Also see Google Press Day posts elsewhere:
- Google Press Day 2006 (Matt Cutts)
- Google Press Day 2006 (Google Blogoscoped)
- Google Press Day Q&A (Google Blogoscoped)
Labels: google, personal, translation
