New technologies set to revolutionised by real-time translating technology.

With Google and Microsoft working to develop a real-time translating device, could the days of enrolling on a language course be a thing of the past?

How great would it be to be able to converse fluently or write a grammatically accurate and engaging email in Chinese, Russian and Italian?

Not that great, according to today’s university goers – few of whom are taking modern language degrees. Perhaps they think that translation software, which has moved on a great deal over recent years, will soon render obsolete the ability to communicate in foreign languages.

Google, for example, is working on software that can translate your words – written or spoken – in real time. And Microsoft demonstrated its speech recognition and translation software on a speech given by chief research officer Rick Rashid in November, 2012.

Mr Rashid’s speech – delivered in Tianjin, China – was translated from English to Chinese and the translation used his own voice, which had been sampled.

The aim of the work by Microsoft and Google Research is to create a device that could, for example, translate the words spoken into one handset so that the listener on the other end hears the words in his or her own language.

The Google Research team developing the software is not made up of linguists, though. Instead, they apply maths and statistics to the problem of translation, building algorithms that can correlate existing translations and find the most accurate one.

Google's Project Tango: 3D mapping on a smartphone.

With smartphones featuring ever more advanced sensors that can track everything from the user’s orientation to the acceleration, we have to really wonder what the next big thing in sensors will be. The answer to that could be Google’s new Project Tango, an initiative that effectively wants smartphones of the future to have eyes. What that means is that smartphones of the future will have mini Kinects in them, and that will obviously result in some awesome applications.

The smartphone that will kick off Project Tango is a custom 5 inch device that has a host of visual sensors and special visual processing units. At the back of the prototype Tango smartphone, there’s a 4 megapixel camera, a depth-sensing module and a motion tracking camera. All of these combined with the custom visual processing units give the Tango the ability to scan a room in full 3D.

Now obviously, this could have some amazing applications. And that’s exactly what Google is hoping for. There are 200 developer kits waiting to be shipped to deserving developers, and they’ll all be taken up by 14th of March 2014. If you’re a developer you can apply for one by filling out this form. Just be sure you’ve got a pretty good use for the Tango smartphone, because Google won’t be handing them out willy-nilly. There’s a good chance the top developers on the Play Store will snag them, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

The applications of Project Tango could be pretty game-breaking and industry changing. The most obvious ones come from gaming and navigation. The advanced 3D scanning capabilities could be put to some creative uses in games, much like augmented reality. Developers could also make use of the scanners and create detailed 3D maps of buildings, which users can then navigate with pinpoint accuracy, with the smartphone guiding them.