Google Translate adds 11 new languages

Google Translate adds 11 new languages: Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Google's machine translation service now supports 35 languages and you can use it to translate text between any combination of languages.

In most cases, Google uses English as an intermediary language, so when you translate a text from Indonesian to Vietnamese, Google translates the text to English and then it translates the result to Vietnamese. You'll get the best results when one of the languages is English, since Google needs a single translation.

Google developed its own translation technology. Google feed the system with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. Then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model.

One of the advantages of this approach is scalability: if Google finds enough parallel text to create a good translation model for a language, it will be added to Google Translate. Microsoft followed suit and Windows Live Translator switched from Systran to Microsoft's machine translation system.

Google book search api published

The Google Book Search API allows you to create more customizable and reliable links to Google Book Search from your site.

For example, this tool lets you generate smart links that appear only when a book is in the index, or display links that indicate to your users whether a book can be previewed on Google Book Search. The Dynamic Links feature also lets you include a thumbnail image in your link to Google Book Search.

The dynamic links documentation is intended for programmers who want to write web applications that link to books within Google Book Search. You should be familiar with the HTTP protocol and basic JavaScript.

Google Book Search respects the user's local copyright restrictions, and as a result, previews or full views of some books are not available in all locations. Viewability is clustered into three different classes. Full view when the entire book is viewable. These books may be in the public domain. Limited preview when a portion of the book is viewable. This book is under copyright and Google Book Search has received permission to make these pages accessible to users. These books differ from snippet view books in that users may view entire pages. Snippet view and no preview when users see only an about the book page.

Google moderator for suggestions

Google Moderator is a new public application from Google initially created for submitting and voting questions from Google's tech talks.

Taliver Heath, the engineer responsible of this 20% project at Google, describes the origin of the new tool: "we host a large number of tech talks. These talks cover a wide rage of Computer Science topics like research in machine learning and methods for ranking images based on text queries. I've enjoyed attending these tech talks, but as the number of attendees has grown over time, the question-and-answer part of the talks hasn't been able to scale".

The application turned out to be useful for other things, like the company's meetings, and Google decided to launch it publicly on the App Engine platform.

You can create a list of suggestions for any service and anyone can add new suggestions or vote on the existing ideas. The most popular ideas are displayed at the top, but Google Moderator also lists random suggestions to make them more visible.

Google audio indexing is GAUDI

Google Audio Indexing is a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken.

Political videos and election materials are a special case of broadcast news content, a domain that has received a lot of academic and industry attention and is known to perform well.

By making the technology available to a wide audience, Google hopes to both offer a useful service and learn what internet users think of this new technology.

Google Audio Indexing uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and leverages the Google indexing technology to return the best results to the user.

The returned videos are ranked based on the spoken content, the metadata, the freshness, etc.

Google periodically crawl the YouTube political channels for new content. As soon as a new video is uploaded to YouTube, it is processed by the system and made available in the index for people to search. The speech research group at Google has developed its own speech recognition system called GAUDI, which powers both Google Audio Indexing and the Google Elections Video Search gadget.

Android SDK 1.0 available

Today you can download the new Android SDK 1.0 official release ( no more betas... ). Android applications are written using the Java programming language. Using the Android Eclipse plugin is the fastest and easiest way to start creating a new Android application. The plugin automatically generates the correct project structure for your application, and keeps the resources compiled for you automatically.

You can find the kernel at http://git.android.com and the other mirrored GPL and LGPL'd components at http://code.google.com/p/android/downloads/list. Notices for other licenses can be found within the SDK.

The SDK consists of two general pieces: a version of the Android platform itself (that runs in the emulator), and the accompanying developer tools that surround it. This means that when we ship SDK releases, all releases within a given series (such as all the SDKs for Android 1.0) will consist of essentially the same platform image, but with different, updated tools.

The first Android-powered device, the T-Mobile G1, was announced on 23 September, 2008. To learn more about the T-Mobile G1, see the T-Mobile G1 site. Other partners will be releasing Android-powered devices in the future. We will update this space with more specific information about each device release, as it becomes available.

Google tenth birthday

A decade ago, a new company called Google was born in California. Google's 10th birthday has an ironic mathematical origin. Google was named by two young Stanford University engineering graduate students in misspelt homage to the word "googol" – an infinity-like number denoting 10 to the power of 100 (that's the number one followed by a hundred zeros).

But the irony is that, in its first 10 years, Google has achieved googel-like growth, ratcheting up the ones and zeros faster than any other company in the history of global capitalism.

The company has gone from a start-up with zero revenue to the best-known brand in the world with almost 20,000 employees, a market cap of around $150bn, annual income in 2007 of $16bn and a truly ubiquitous search-engine which indexes tens of billions of web pages, serves billions of daily requests and fields 66 per cent of all web searches. This pre-adolescent Silicon Valley company has become both the lead actor and the most complex metaphor of our digital age.

If you like too see the Google evolution and remember funny stuff from Google, you can visit the tenth birthday site that Google has created for the purpose... Enjoy.

G1 to cost $179 available in October

The first phone from Google to make the Internet easy to use on the go was revealed Tuesday, and it looks a lot like an iPhone.

T-Mobile USA showed off the G1, a phone that, like Apple Inc.'s iPhone, has a large touch screen. But it also packs a trackball, a slide-out keyboard and easy access to Google's e-mail and mapping programs.

T-Mobile said it will begin selling the G1 for $179 with a two-year contract. The device hits U.S. stores Oct. 22 and heads to Britain in November and other European countries early next year.

The phone will be sold in T-Mobile stores only in the U.S. cities where the company has rolled out its faster, third-generation wireless data network. By launch, that will be 21 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami.

In other areas, people will be able to buy the phone from T-Mobile's Web site. The phone does work on T-Mobile's slower data network, but it's optimized for the faster networks. It can also connect at Wi-Fi hotspots.

The data plan for the phone will cost $25 per month on top of the calling service, at the low end of the range for data plans at U.S. wireless carriers. And at $179, the G1 is $20 less than the least expensive iPhone in the U.S.

G1 the first Google phone with Android

Today T-Mobile has released the first mobile phone with Android, Google’s mobile operating system, in a launch that could win the search giant 4 percent of the smartphone market.

The T-Mobile/Google phone, dubbed the G1, is the newest agitator in a fast-moving U.S. smartphone market so far dominated by Research In Motion with 16 million BlackBerry subscribers, followed by newcomer Apple, who in 15 months has already sold over 10 million iPhones.

The G1, which is expected to retail for $199 and carry the Google brand, should be available for sale in a few weeks. Details are scarce--other than the obvious web browsing and e-mail capabilities--but the phone is expected to be an iPhone/BlackBerry hybrid of some sort, with a touch screen and a full tactile keyboard.

In a then unique move, Google had announced a free software platform and operating system for mobile devices based on Linux, which would be available to mobile carriers under the Apache free-software and open-source license. The Android OS now has the muscle of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of 34 software, hardware, and telecommunications companies.

But since Google started its Android effort the industry has seen the launch of two other free, open-source mobile software platforms, heating up the competition for web advertising domination.

Symbian, the world's largest supplier of software for smartphones--with 57 percent market share--was bought by Nokia in June, and like Google the Finnish company decided to make the software available to other phone makers for free. But Google remains the undisputed king of web advertising, a precious advantage over any rival, and it already counts T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel on its side.

AT&T, the leading U.S. phone carrier and distributor of the iPhone--which runs on Apple's operating system--remains undecided if it will sign up an open-source mobile operating system.