December 20, 2007 at 12:21 am · Authored by Ricky · Filed under Mobile, Mobile Services, Telephony, Uncategorized, VOIP

It might be a stretch, but Google has introduced new Bots for its Google Talk service that will automatically translate IM conversations on the fly. For it to work, both chatters must add the appropriate bot to the conversation, and off it goes. For instance, if I wanted to chat with someone in Germany, I would add the German-to-English bot, and they would add the English-to-German bot, and we would then chat as normal, with the bots making it all easy cheesy.

This got me thinking about the possibility of an application that could do this through your phone (or over Skype or some other VOIP application). What if you could call someone in a foreign country and chat with them as if you were both chatting in your native tongue?

I don’t know how far off this is, but if it’s in IM, surely it can’t be too much more difficult or far off to add a text-to-speech feature, and then a speech-to-text on the other end, and then make all that happen directly on the handset, with a translator in the middle.

Things like this would really make VOIP something exciting, in my opinion, but there’s also other entertainment values as well. Think women speaking in foreign languages are hot? Does your wife nag you all the time on the phone? Next time she calls, why not switch her into French? It’s not like she expects you to remember what she’s said anyways, and at least then it’s a pleasureable conversation for you.

Any other great business opportunities you can think of with this?