I think it's cool. I played with it for Android (not the voice input, but the text based input and the voice output). I was with a Russian and Turkish colleague (I speak American English). We found that the translation was pretty good--but that the speech synthesis was pretty bad for both Turkish and Russian. Has anyone checked it out for Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish?
I've tried certain phrases in Chinese and I'm not sure if it's my accent or what but it can't seem to recognize the word "河蟹" (river crab). Incidentally, it's also Chinese Internet slang for harmonizing/censorship.
I just tried it for Dutch, and it got one out of the ten 5-word sentences I tried, correct. Some sentences only got one word right, and I sure was articulating like they do on national television ;)
They just got a much greater sample size for English, matter of time for the rest of the languages I hope.
"... and I sure was articulating like they do on national television" Not sure what they trained their algorithm on, but this articulation might have been the culprit. If they have a corpus of "normal people" speaking Dutch, and then you go and articulate, you will get poor results.
