The future is now. It’s surprising that the earth didn’t stop turning when Google released its Google Translate app for the iPhone. Please let me explain what it’s all about.

Thanks to this application from Google you can now speak to your phone and let Google translate it instantly and say the words in that language. The application is free and only requires Internet access. As Internet access rarely costs more than $1-$2 per month in developing countries, this means that you’ve basically got a great translator in your pocket for free.

Especially that the application says the translated words is truly amazing. The quality of the translations is great, which isn’t surprising when you realize that Google has the largest text database in the world to draw inspiration…. I use the previous unfinished sentence regularly to illustrate that language is a lot about the expectations in your brain. And quite simply, when you ‘read’ the enormous amounts of text that Google does, it comes as no surprise that they/it are very good in forecasting what somebody is going to say.

In any case, the need for learning another language is greatly diminished as our Google overlords have already done this for us. It wouldn’t surprise me if in the very near future you can call somebody and speak in your language and the other person hears it in their language. In addition, I wonder when we’ll think that ‘everybody had to learn a language’ (instead of making sure that 1 program knows it really well) will sound hopelessly outdated.

Singularity is near.