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Behind I.B.M.’s Big Predictions - NYTimes.com (automated mobile language translation) | MediaFuturist

Reposted from http://bit.ly/AwhO9T on February 16, 2012 at 09:59AM

Imagine what this will do to education, marketing and content / media… Eta: 3 years.Behind I.B.M.’s Big Predictions - NYTimes.com

http://nyti.ms/xkDT2q

– Powerful mobile devices, capable of precise language translation, will belong to 80 percent of the world’s population. While this is nearly intuitive, given the ever-lower cost of phones, the real breakthrough will be ubiquitous voice recognition and translation capabilities, which will make the phones highly useful to large populations who are illiterate, or who have languages that aren’t easily written with keypads.

(A question is: What would this mean for world markets and politics when ordinary people can easily communicate with each other despite speaking different languages?)

(via Instapaper)