Much like Stanza identifies songs, Cry Translator identifies cries.
In the classic Simpsons episode "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?", Homer's long-lost brother Herb invents a baby translator. The baby cries, the machine announces its meaning (in Danny DeVito's inimitable voice) in plain English.
Seventeen years later, there's an app for that. Cry Translator promises to identify the "five distinct cries" made by infants.
In other words, you no longer have to wonder if your ankle-biter is tired, hungry, mad, stressed, or just bored. It's like Stanza for crybabies.
My first reaction: That's cheating! My second reaction: Why wasn't this around nine years ago when I needed it? And finally: No way does this actually work.
Unfortunately, I'm fresh out of babies on which to test it. So I'll throw this out to anyone willing to invest $9.99 on the promise of easier parenting. Put the app to the test, then report your findings here.
For what it's worth, the app not only translates Junior's cries, but also offers suggestions on how to calm him. You can also enter emergency contacts, like your pediatrician, for quick and easy access.
Again, I have my doubts about whether this really works--but wouldn't it be awesome if it did? The developer cites a study--conducted in Spain--that reported a 96-percent success rate in calming crying babies when following the supplied suggestions.
If nothing else, it might be $10 well-spent just to calm fretful parents. Once upon a time, I was one of them.
Updated July 2 at 10:30 a.m. PDT: The full list of supported languages has been added to the bottom of the story.
Toolbars have long been an effective way for software publishers to add several features to a browser at once, and the Google Toolbar has long been among the most popular of these. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer introduces revamped translation tools, giving users one-click powers of conversion over many languages.
Google Toolbar for IE now offers one-click page translation.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The toolbar now detects your default language setting and using the Translate button will attempt to convert the page to it. Clicking a link will automatically translate the new page, as long as its part of the same domain as the original. Forty-one languages are supported so far, from Spanish, French, Italian, and German to Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi, Ukranian, and Vietnamese.
Not all words on a page will be translated, but from my tests that seems limited only to text that's been embedded in logos and other art. If you need a lot of on-the-fly translation, this could be a major time saver. The feature has not been extended to Google Toolbar for Firefox, although Google said on its blog post announcing the feature that it hopes to implement it soon.
The new feature supports Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Google's expertise in translation has begun to pay dividends for an entirely separate project, its Chrome browser--as well as any other software using the open-source spell-checking package called Hunspell.
Chrome combines WebKit's spell-check infrastructure with Hunspell's multilanguage library of correctly spelled words to supply spell-check in 27 languages. But many widely used words were missing from Hunspell, and Google used its translation expertise to fill in the gaps.
Here's the explanation in a Wednesday blog post from Google programmers Brett Wilson and Siddhartha Chattopadhyay:
"The Hunspell dictionary maintainers have done a great job creating high-quality dictionaries that anybody can use, but one of the problems with any dictionary is that there are inevitably omissions, especially as new words appear or proper nouns come into common use. We at Google are in a good position to use our knowledge of the internet to identify and fix some of these omissions. The Google translation team used their language models to generate a sorted list of the most popular words in each language. This was cross-checked with the Hunspell dictionaries to generate a list of the top 1000 words not present in each dictionary. This list includes many popular words, but also common misspellings. To remove these words, each list was reviewed by specialist in that language. Generally, we tried to keep proper nouns and even foreign words as long as they were in common usage.
Among the English words Google added to the dictionary: antivirus, anime, screensaver, Mozilla, Obama, and Wikipedia.
Google released the resulting dictionary entries under the three open-source licenses that Hunspell uses: the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License. Google added new words for 19 languages into the latest developer preview version of Chrome, 2.0.160.0.
By virtue of the way open-source software works, Google's work can help others who adopt the freely available changes. According to the Hunspell site, "Hunspell is the default spell checker of OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox 3 and Thunderbird."
(Credit:
CNET)
For Senior Editors Bonnie Cha and Kent German, Future Apps' new language program for the iPhone and iPod Touch may be just the thing to get them around Barcelona next week as they attend the GSMA Mobile World Congress in that famed Spanish city.
iSpeak is a set of translation apps that can convert words and sentences from English to another language, or vice versa. You type your phrase into the app, which quickly translates your text. If you're not sure how to pronounce the phrase, pressing a button triggers the app to speak the words aloud. iSpeak got our basic Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish test phrases pretty closely, though it didn't manage to pronounce the read-out as Catalonians would (though, to be fair, Catalan is not the same language as Spanish).
We wish we could speak phrases into the app rather than type them, because that would save time as well as joint use. Of course, voice recognition is a different technology, and one that adds layers of complexity if multiple dialects are involved. Still, as long as we're drawing up a wish list, voice input is at the top.
The application's extra features are modest, and include two sliders to control the volume and speed of the voice that utters your translation. You'll also be able to save a translation or e-mail a particularly useful one to a friend. iSpeak stores a list of the translations you saved, and can helpfully switch the direction of translation, from Polish to English and back again, for instance, by pressing a toggle button.
iSpeak costs $2 for each of its separate nine translators of Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, and Swedish. The heavy focus on European languages is likely attributed to Acapela Group, which is a European voice company that provided the "speak" element of the iSpeak app. Acapela says in a press release that new languages are part of the company's plan.
Here's another item for our iSpeak wish list: an all-in-one version of the translation app that lets frequent international travelers translate from English to any language in iSpeak's greater lexicon, not just from English to one other language. The next step after that, of course, is to let non-English travelers translate among iSpeak's language directories, for example translating from French to Swedish. For now, though, iSpeak for iPhone is a good, basic translator that can also coach you in how to pronounce words and phrases. For a more intensive travel language guide that also includes voice playback, try these other travel apps.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
You may have noticed a trend in my iPhone apps of the week posts: I mostly download games. To offer a little balance to my posts, this week I have a couple of useful iPhone apps that aren't just for when you want to waste some time. Both are free so you can take advantage of these useful tools right away.
Preview the results before hitting the send e-mail button.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Free Translator is a language translator that lets you send e-mails in different languages. The concept is fairly simple: choose a source language, choose a target language, and then hit translate. When you're finished, you can send the translated message via e-mail--great if you have non-English-speaking relatives living in another country. Free Translator can translate between 31 languages. Like all software translators, your mileage may vary as far as accuracy, so try to keep it simple and most likely the recipient will be able to understand what you're trying to say.
Browse Wikipedia easily with this app that's perfectly formatted for the iPhone.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Wikiamo makes Wikipedia a much better experience on the iPhone because it automatically formats the screen for easy readability. It offers forward and back buttons for quick navigation between pages you've already visited and the ability to create and use bookmarks for info you want to save. You also get your viewing history to go back to favorite pages, and Wikiamo caches pages so you can view them even when you're not connected. I think my favorite feature is the contents button, which sends you immediately to the table of contents so you can get the specific information about your selected subject immediately.
What's your most useful downloaded iPhone app? Got a good game for me to try? Let me know in the comments!
(Credit:
Google)
Any jokes about Google becoming a self-aware, humanity-destroying robot got a little closer to fruition yesterday. Google Talk (download the desktop widget), Google's homemade Jabber-based chat client, is now host to 24 (and counting) new translation bots that will take whatever text you throw at it and convert it to the appropriate language. Each of the bots was built with an open protocol called XMPP that lets anyone build their own bots and share them on the Google Talk network--as long as you've got some place to host them.
The new bots become particularly useful if you invite one into a group chat with one or more users who speak a different language. The bot will automatically translate the conversation so each user can understand one another, which you can see on the screenshot to the left.
The translation bot project was the result of some of the Google Talk team's 20 percent rule, Google's somewhat infamous option of having software engineers spend one day a week working on side projects. Besides bots, some of the other services that have come out of 20 percent time have been AdSense, Orkut, keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader, and Google News.
[Via Google Talkabout]
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