Voice assistants and real-time translation: enabling tomorrow’s technologies

If you’ve taken a look at some of our recent posts, you’ll have seen the wide range of resources our API supports, from language games to life-saving applications such as Sex eLimu. Many of the apps that have been created would have existed only in the realms of fiction a mere ten years ago. Of course, as technology evolves and plays an ever more significant role in our lives, we’re also thinking about how tomorrow’s applications, devices, and services could benefit from language APIs and the work required to enable them.

What’s clear is that application developers will continue to find new ways to entertain, educate, and connect people across the world through language. Over the last twenty years, the rise of the Internet has led to the world becoming a much smaller place and, as we become more closely connected – through shared interests, commerce, and global causes – the desire for seamless, intelligent communications becomes ever more imperative.

Innovative applications like Indotalk, which supports text and voice-to-voice translation across over 80 languages, are cutting a path to a future where language barriers no longer exist. We see a future in which every application supports integrated language definition and automated, contextually-relevant translation.

Emails sent across the world in one language are received in the reader’s language of choice. As the volume of content published online continues to explode, web pages, news resources, online publications, journals, blog posts, even social media posts, can be read and enjoyed the world over with contextual clarity. Intelligent machine-translation will deliver near-perfect results, supported by language data – such as we’re making available through our corpora. Through the work we’re leading to extend learning and education worldwide through Oxford Global Languages, wherever you are in the world, you need not miss out.

The rapid rise of voice assistants in the home, through Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Cortana from Microsoft, and the Google Assistant, for example, has certainly captured our attention. As control moves from text-based commands and gestures to natural language and voice interfaces, exciting and connected device experiences are no longer the within exclusive realm of science-fiction. But we believe the delivery of those experiences will depend on the highest-quality language data and underlying services that enliven voice assistance with contextual intelligence. The data we make available through corpora, and the projects we’re running now to expand and interlink that data further, ensure that the Oxford Dictionaries API is well-placed to bring tomorrow’s technology that little bit closer.

So while we get to work delivering new features and enhanced performance, why not see how you can harness the power of language to support your application through our API.