Sunday, June 07, 2020

Google Translate Annoyances

In this day and age of almost daily major advances in computational linguistics and the reputation of Google and its affiliates a wizards of AI & machine learning it is almost astonishing how poorly their smartphone application does.

I have a strong need for English to Chinese and vice versa translations. Thus my list of annoyances covers only these two language pairs and it covers only voice input.

Annoyances:
  1. English sentences longer than about 5-6 words will be truncated or it runs into trouble with transcribing it into proper English text.
  2. Frequently, I have to repeat English sentences, because it misinterprets my words although it is my smartphone for over a year (Samsung S10)
  3. Chinese voice input by a native Chinese speaker from central China does not fare any better on my smartphone. He sometimes has to repeat speaking the Chinese sentences for half a dozen times until he gives up.

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