Google CEO previews mobile goodies, announces primacy of mobile

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 17 February 2010 11:28

Opinion and Analysis

In his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, said that mobile was not the first platform for which Google developed any new application, and he staged impressive demonstrations of voice search, image search, and language translation combined with optical character recognition.

However to me what Google's showmanship did most powerfully was to give new impetus the message that demand for mobile data bandwidth and its underlying resource - spectrum - will soar, along with the demand for processing power in the cloud.

Schmidt's message was that the driver is the confluence of powerful devices connected to much more powerful 'cloud' servers to deliver "things you can do that never occurred to you as being possible."

A prime example is the possibility of real time translation of the spoken word. As Schmidt pointed out, voice recognition has been around on mobile devices for several years, but new cloud-based variants are far superior. "You send the voice files into the cloud and they are processed in our case by hundreds of thousands of computers in parallel...to get an answer that is remarkably accurate."

Google has been offering voice search for about a year, and announced that it had added a fourth language to the English, Japanese and Mandarin and already available.

Google already provides translation of text to and from 100 languages and demonstrated combined optical character recognition and language translation.

According to Schmidt, the next stage is to recognise and translate the spoken word, in near real time. "We are not quite there yet, but it is coming," he said.

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