19 December 2007

Babble Babble Babble, we need a way to babble!

Been looking around for Babelfish services across the web, mainly services from Altavista, Yahoo, Google and Windows Live, it'd seems like this is a direction that all major competitors are trying to achieve and in my personal opinion, it's one service that will actually have a huge impact around the world.

Unfortunately,  from my research, none of these sites expose it as web services, even if they do, like Google, it's restricted purely for academic research purpose only.  Will it be nice if they do what they did with  Google Maps and Virtual earth and ask the world to help them use it and test it?

In our software, Jumptree Project Management, we have customers who have teams across the world, some are in the United States and others are in China. We sure 'd love to have the babblefish being consumed through web services and the team members will have a preference setting "Translate all messages from English local to Chinese" selected and babble babble, whenever they talk to each other, they could at least figure out what the other team member is saying... (Of course, I'm sure most people speak English these days, but I think everyone still prefer to read in their own language)

Why is it an important feature you ask? In sci-fi movies like Star-Trek (taking the risk of sounding way too nerdy), we've always seen these translator gadgets, but these days, it's not fictions anymore. (I'm sure William Shatner will say "I told you so") We are reaching the edge of this break-through, it's time to have the world starts to use it. If any developers from one of these translator providers do ever comes through this article, I strongly urge them to push for the release of the web services.

As a software provider, I see an unlimited growth in its usefulness and truly connects people around the world together. This is something I will keep my eyes peeled for the next few years to come.
 

 

 

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