Google Assistant has been rated as the best top performing real time voice translator, beating Skype and Apple’s Siri.
In the benchmark, conducted by One Hour Translation (OHT), Google scored the highest – 4.54 out of 6, Skype second (4.32) and Siri third (4.09). Google was the best in Japanese (4.01), German (4.5) and Spanish (4.8), while Siri led in French (4.87).
OHT, an online platform which provides translations in more than 100 languages and 3,000 language pairs, used expert in-house linguists to compare the performance of Skype Translator, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri in translating business and tourism expressions from English into Japanese, French, German and Spanish and vice versa.
With demand for real time voice translation on the rise, OHT decided to test out the leading services: Skype Translator (run by Microsoft Translate), Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri, and rank them for accuracy.
With the help of expert in-house linguists OHT took 16 business and 10 tourism expressions and translated them from English into Japanese, French, German and Spanish and vice versa. The same sentences were then given to real time voice translator devices, apps and digital assistants to see just how they performed. The results were rated by the linguists on a scale of 0 to 6.
On average across languages, Google scored the highest – 4.54 out of 6, Skype second (4.32) and Siri third (4.09). Google was the best in three out of the four languages – Japanese (4.01), German (4.5) and Spanish (4.8), while Siri led in French (4.87). Overall Japanese was the hardest language to translate with an average score of 3.7. French was the easiest language for the instant voice translator devices to translate with an average of 4.75, followed by Spanish (4.54) and German (4.41).
“The real time voice translators were more accurate in translating tourism related experssions in comparison to business expressions” said Yaron Kaufman, chief marketing officer and co-founder of OHT. He attributed this to the use of a lot of business-related abbreviations which are not easily recognized by real time voice devices. Kaufman added that “despite the recent improvements in all of the assistants we tested, real time voice translations still cannot be relied on for business related content.”
Some examples of the sentences: “Stay on budget for this campaign, we can’t have it affecting our ROI”; “R&D are cutting too many corners, the product is undeployable”; “Schedule a meeting between your CMO and our product manager”; “Do you have any allergies? This dish contains peanuts and avocado”; “I need to find the fastest way to the airport, my plane is leaving soon”; “My travel insurance should cover that bill.”
There are also new developments on the horizon in the field of real time voice translation. Among other advancements, Amazon is planning to release a DIY toolkit for creating translation apps and Xiaomi has released a new and advanced physical device for real time translations.