I have a bad enough time getting Siri to understand my Aussie accent. Throw in something as inaccurate as Google Translate and you'll have... A pile of garbage really.
I desperately need something to translate Japanese into my ear, and I'm probably just good enough to relay my point back without the other party needing an eng->jp version, so I would be a prime customer for this gadget. But the technological accuracy is just not yet there in either speech recognition or translation.
I'm from Scotland, and on the rare occassions time I need to phone a US voice activated phone line (e.g. Expedia.com's), I have to put on a ridiculous American accent for the system to understand me.
The japanese version will be pretty terrible, I'd imagine. Too much homophones and ambiguous wording. "sounandayo!" = そうなんだよ "that's right!" = 遭難だよ "it's an accident!"
The pitch on those are quite different and there is obviously context to rely on too. I mean whether the software can do all that is a question, but something like Siri does OK with Japanese speech recognition (at least not a lot worse than other languages from what I can tell).
I live in Montreal and my biggest gripe with Siri is her not being bilingual! There are so many street names or place names here that are French and when I want to send a message to a francophone friend I can only use handsfree mode in English.
Imagine that in Northern Ontario/Val d'Or French, which still has a vowel system that's almost dead in the south now. The grammar's not as different now as it was when I was a kid (that's more than a half-century ago) but that's not quite "standard Canadian French" either, let alone continental French.
I desperately need something to translate Japanese into my ear, and I'm probably just good enough to relay my point back without the other party needing an eng->jp version, so I would be a prime customer for this gadget. But the technological accuracy is just not yet there in either speech recognition or translation.