Augmented reality, courtesy of Google?

Do you love your smartphone? Do you hate how hard it is to use, with its tiny screen (okay, they're getting bigger) and its lack of a real keyboard? Well help is on the way. Augmented reality anyone?

What does augmented reality mean? It means speech recognition. Real-time voice translation. And computer vision (information about what you're looking at, like the Terminator had!).

With that in mind, consider the following series of articles from Xconomy. These articles are FASCINATING:

"Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 1, New Frontiers of Speech Recognition" by Wade Roush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/01/03/inside-googles-age-of-augmented-humanity-part-1-new-frontiers-of-speech-recognition/

Voice recognition on a limited scale is one thing. But Google's push to make it ubiquitous is really amazing.

"Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 2, Changing the Equation in Machine Translation" by Wade Roush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/01/05/inside-googles-age-of-augmented-humanity-part-2-changing-the-equation-in-machine-translation/

Remember the universal translator from Star Trek? It may be coming soon to a cell phone near you.

"Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity, Part 3: Computer Vision Puts a 'Bird on Your Shoulder'" by Wade Roush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/01/06/inside-googles-age-of-augmented-humanity-part-3-computer-vision-puts-a-bird-on-your-shoulder/

They describe this as a "bird on your shoulder" but the word "Skynet" keeps coming to mind (!). I've said it before and I'll say it again: Treat your Android phone well. Maybe the machines will kill you last. :)

I love how Google is the place where all this is coming together. We have the resources (brilliant people, tons of data, and massive data centers) to make it all happen. I would say that I can't wait--except Voice Search on Android phones is already scary good. As is the Google Translate app I have on my phones. (Did you hear that the latest Google Translate for Android is already doing "Conversation Mode" between English and Spanish?) I don't have an iPhone but I've heard about an app called Word Lens that does instant visual translation. And apps such as Layar are already taking the first steps towards computer vision.

So what's the next step? Consider this article from Pocketnow.com:
"Android 3.0 Honeycomb Has Google-Built Augmented Reality?" by Evan Blass
http://pocketnow.com/android/android-30-gingerbread-bringing-google-built-augmented-reality