Since a few of our videos were taken down due to mysterious celestial forces, we're reposting our interviews from the Hollywood Style Awards. A few months back, we journeyed to the City of Angels and asked some celebs to opine on our Daily Question
Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]
As WSJ points out, Gmail (
) users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter (
Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google ()-owned YouTube () and Picasa () will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook ().
If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck () or Seesmic (), looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.
An issue with the latter, however, is that Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.
In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.
In Douglas Adams’ humorous sci-fi novel series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a special kind of fish is mentioned – the Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, it translates any spoken language to whichever language the listener understands. It is a very nifty device, and now Google seeks to create something similar.
According to Times Online, Google is developing a speech-to-speech automated translator for Android phones. It’s essentially a combination of two of Google’s existing technologies; its online universal translator service, Google Translate, and its voice recognition system.
Google plans to make its Babel Fish a lot like a human translator; the software would analyze chunks of speech, and translating them in their entirety, rather than translating word for word. Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, claims the technology could go live in a couple of years. “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. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently,” he says.
Anyone who’s used Google Translate knows that translations aren’t (and probably never will be) perfect, but they’re very helpful when you can’t understand a word of some foreign language. However, Google’s voice recognition also has issues of its own, and I fear that these two combined would produce a very high amount of errors. The Times also mentions the issue of different accents, a problem that Google plans to solve by making the software gradually learn the speaking habits of the phone’s owner.
Despite the big issues Google has to overcome to make this technology useful, if anyone can pull it off, Google can. The idea of being able to call someone who doesn’t speak your language, and have the conversation translated almost instantly, well, that’s one of those inventions that made Google the company it is today.
