海角大神

Whether it鈥檚 the 鈥渦niversal translator鈥� of Star Trek fame or the weird but effective Babel fish from Hitchhiker鈥檚 Guide to the Galaxy, devices (and animals) for overcoming the language barrier have long been loved in science fiction.

Today, the reality might be closer than ever.

Over the weekend, Google announced that it will soon release updates to its mobile translation app, enabling the program to automatically recognize when a user is speaking in a popular language and turn it into text in real time, The New York Times reports. This is a leap forward from the app鈥檚 current version, which is limited to translating written text between 80 languages and hearing translations in a few well-known ones.

Google鈥檚 updates are the latest in a series of efforts by both technology giants and startups to make translating text and conversations as easy as possible. Just last month, Microsoft launched a preview of Skype Translator, 鈥渢he most recent and visible example鈥� of more than a decade of research in speech recognition, machine learning technology and automatic translation. The app currently allows for automatic voice-to-voice translation between English and Spanish speakers, with the goal of expanding to include 鈥渁s many languages as possible on as many platforms as possible.鈥�

Word Lens, an app developed by Quest Launch in 2010 and since bought by Google, has the ability to translate languages using only a smartphone: Users just hold up their phone鈥檚 camera to a sign and the app immediately translates the words. The app was adapted for Google Glass in November 2013.

Word Lens is useful for European languages, as it currently translates between English and German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. Users who need help with Asian languages might benefit more from聽Waygo, which employs a similar camera translation process for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Both Word Lens and Waygo are available to iPhone and Android users.

Of course, these translating programs and devices have their limits. Google Translate still tends to garble long text translations, a snag that might have something to do with how the app is designed: Instead of having an algorithm designed to extract meaning from particular words and phrases, the program scours the internet for similar texts with which to pair the searched expression. The vast corpus, or database of language, that the app can look through includes everything from UN documents in six different languages to all the papers ever put out by the European Union since 1957, among many others.

Skype, too,聽struggles to work with a variety of accents and cadences, while Word Lens has trouble deciphering stylized fonts and handwriting.

Still, as The New York Times鈥� Quentin Hardy puts it, 鈥渢hose complaints are churlish compared with what also seemed like a fundamental miracle: Within minutes, I was used to the process and talking freely with a Colombian man about his wife, children and life in Medell铆n (or 鈥楳ade A,鈥� as Skype first heard it, but it later got it correctly). The single biggest thing that separates us 鈥� our language 鈥� had started to disappear.鈥澛犅�

And it sure beats having a fish squirming in your ear.