“The future of travel guides? - Greensboro News & Record” plus 1 more

The future of travel guides? - Greensboro News & Record

Posted: 13 May 2010 11:59 PM PDT

The future of travel guides?

Have you been to the travel section of the bookstore lately? Pretty overwhelming, right? Big, bulky books, and some of the information that you might not really need. And for some destinations, you might have 20 books to pick from. You can't carry that around, and certainly can't afford that many books.

Sure, we all use travel apps, but sometimes, you want more detailed information. There's got to be an in between, right?

There was an Associated Press story this week that mentioned a new product by Eyewitness Travel Guides publisher Dorling Kindersley, where you get to pick what goes in your own personal guidebook for your trip. Do you want to focus on shopping? Dining? Lots of maps, etc.? You get to put what you want in it.

And then, you can either download electronically – for FREE, or have it mailed to you as a bound book. That's pretty neat. Check out their site.

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Google’s Translation Software Improving More and More - Best Mobile Contracts (blog)

Posted: 13 May 2010 07:20 PM PDT

google voice translation People who love to travel will certainly enjoy having a Google Android smart phone by their side. Not only is the device fully loaded with all the crucial maps and guides to travelling in new locations, but it will also help users figure out the various languages they encounter.

Last week, Google Goggles got update with a very interesting upgrade to its text recognition software, the augmented reality app would be able to not only recognize text, but would also be able to translate text written in foreign languages. The service had a very simply formula: convert various languages to English using automated programs similar to the ones used on the internet. Of course, the output is pretty funny to read as it often comes out in broken English (as grammatical structures tend to vary with each language) but the service does its jobs well.

Google had also previously released a service that allowed for text content to be translated and spoken in a different language. The service started out small too, much like the Goggles app which only covered a very small number of languages. Still, the text spoken in Haitian, French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish quickly helped users as the audio output allowed for easier conversations.

Seeing the great potential with the system, Google has decided to expand the translation software to include a whole new host of other languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.

In order to put in so many additional languages, Google made the sacrifice of quality: the audio output is not as polished as the ones for the languages in the first batch. At the same time, this compromise is further pushed by the fact that it is difficult to perfect the automated audio conversion of text.

Tags: Google, google-android, Google-Goggles, Google-Translate, Google-Translation

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Google Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Maps Guides

Friday, May 14, 2010