Ray Kurzweil

By 2009 real-time speech-translating phone calls will be in common use for many language pairs.

“Translating telephone technology (where you speak in English and your Japanese friend hears you in Japanese, and vice versa) is commonly used for many language pairs.”

Said on

1 January 1999 · Prediction for 2009 (communication section) from The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), as quoted in his 2010 self-review "How My Predictions Are Faring", which grades it "Essentially correct".

Source

How My Predictions Are Faring (October 2010) · The Kurzweil Library

Should come true

2009

How sure they sounded

none (stated as fact about 2009)

Categories

AITechnology

Importance

3 of 5 · Routine speech translation would change international communication and business.

Outcome

Right, but late Happened 15 December 2014.

In 2009 speech-to-speech translation existed only in niche or military systems (e.g. IBM MASTOR) and was not commonly used for phone calls. Consumer tools followed later: Google Translate's conversation mode (2011) and Skype Translator's real-time translated calls (preview December 2014), which made it a routine capability on phones and PCs in the mid-2010s. Kurzweil's "Essentially correct" grade relies on prototypes, which this score does not accept.

Evidence:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_Translator
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate
• https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Faring.pdf