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Google has elevated the profile of its attempt to make videos searchable through speech recognition technology, a move that portends a potentially more financially successful YouTube division.

The speech recognition technology was used in an online application that let people search political speeches launched in July, and now the Gaudi (Google Audio Indexing) project has an official interface at Google Labs.

The site's search box has instructions: "Search what the politicians are saying." The search results are presented next to a YouTube video player, and clicking each result sets the player to show the part of the … Read more

Google's always up to something, and here's a recap of some recent moves.

• Google is making room for gargantuan display ads on YouTube, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which cites advertising industry sources.

Making money off the popular video-sharing service is a top Google priority this year, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said.

•  "Transparency" is a hot computing buzzword as everyone from Twitter to SalesForce.com seeks to share information about Web service availability so customers and users don't feel quite so helpless when things go wrong. And Google has showed it got … Read more

Google has updated yet another one of its products to work better on Apple's iPhone. On Thursday the company launched a new version of its Translate service that lets anyone convert their native tongue into one of the other 23 available languages.

The service has been reworked mainly to appeal to travelers who don't want to carry around phrase books and have their mobile phones with them anyway. In a post about the update, Google software engineer Allen Hutchison notes that the tool uses as minimal an amount of data as possible, so it won't break the … Read more

Google has released a version of its translation service that is specifically tailored to Apple's iPhone.

The Google Translate mobile service, launched late Thursday, came about as the result of the company's "20 percent" time policy, which sets aside a day of each employee's week for work on any new project or idea they may wish to pursue. Google has not yet made any announcements about future versions of the service that could work on other handsets, but a company representative told ZDNet UK on Friday that such versions were intended.

Because the service works … Read more

Telephony service JaJah has launched two completely different voice tools that are both useful in their own right. The first is a new "concierge" service that lets you call any of your contacts with voice dialing using a special local access number. It works even if your handset does not support voice dialing, and will connect you to that person as long as you've synced up your address book with JaJah's.

The other service, called Babel, is more useful for people visiting Beijing as part of this summer's Olympics. By calling a special phone number … Read more

Updated 1:17 p.m. to correct that Google ranked first in the machine-translation accuracy evaluation. Updated 10:50 a.m. PDT with Google's no-comment.

Google looks set to launch a beta test of a document translation service, a new move in the company's efforts to break down language barriers.

With the service, the company will connect people who need documents translated with humans who will be paid to do so, according to the Google Translation Center information page. The site was spotted by sharp eyes at the Google Blogoscoped blog.

"Google Translation Center is the fast … Read more

If you've been on the hunt for a tool that lets you chat with friends or clients that speak a different language, MeGlobe is a really simple solution that does all the work for you. Like Meebo, it will turn a single open browser window in a Webtop where you can manage your buddy list and chat windows. There's no software to install, and it handles 15 languages with relative ease.

I gave it a spin using French to English, and as advertised it translates in real time. You see what the person wrote in small letters, with … Read more

On-the-fly reference can be a pain. Say you're reading something with a word you don't understand or that's simply been written in a foreign language. Finding out what that word means usually requires a copy paste into Google and going to one of the free online dictionaries. If you're lucky enough to be using Safari on a Mac, you can just hit Cmd-Control-D, which will pull up the definition from the built-in dictionary, but that's not going to work on words outside of English, or if you're on a PC, or using another browser. … Read more

Google Translate just got more useful for a Prague citizen visiting India.

The online translation function now can understand 10 more languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish. That brings the total to 23 languages, Google said in a blog posting Thursday.

In addition, Google added a language-detection feature that can guess the source language a user is trying to translate. It's more effective with longer amounts of text, Google said.

Detect Language means you only have to click the language you want to translate text into.