Twitter has the starring role as opening up Net communications about Iran's turbulent politics, but Google and Facebook are jumping in with their its own hasty efforts.
Google is adding Farsi, or Persian, language support to its translation service, the company announced Thursday night. Google rushed out the support specifically because of events in Iran, said Principal Scientist Franz Och in a blog posting.
Google used its YouTube blog to spotlight often violent conflicts between Iranian police and protesters.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran," Och said. "Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa--increasing everyone's access to information."
And Facebook produced a beta version of its social-networking site in Persian, Facebook localization engineer Eric Kwan said in a blog posting.
"Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian--the native language of Iran--but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages," Kwan said. "We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site."
Google's translation service so far is optimized for translating between English and Farsi, but Google is working on expanding that to support other language combinations, Och said. A quick test for me showed it workable translating Persian to English.
The Internet lowers barriers between different cultures, countries, and languages, but censors can seriously curtail access to Internet services. Of course, there often are ways to sidestep censors for those with some technical know-how.
Google also has spotlighted citizen journalist efforts on YouTube to document the crackdown on Iranian protesters.
Google has struggled with censorship in China in particular, concluding that censorship cooperation is better than not participating in the market at all.
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.
Google Audio Indexing (Gaudi) lets people use a text search of some YouTube videos. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Google)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 video where the words were spoken. It doesn't just show speeches--a search for "bridge to nowhere" also returned the "Real Mavericks" ad from the John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign.
Extracting words from videos could make it easier for Google to determine what content is in the video and therefore what ads are most appropriate to show next to them. Making money from YouTube is a top priority this year.
Speech-to-text conversion also could help Google blend relevant videos into search results. Currently, the best way to understand what's in a video is by examining the accompanying metadata, such as titles and captions, but that's often much narrower than what's spoken.
And with Google's translation work, it's possible that the company could transcribe videos' text into other languages.
Clearly, Google has big ambitions for the audio recognition technology. "The aim of Google Audio Indexing on Google Labs is broader (than that of the and the Google Elections Video Search gadget), and the U.S. election is just a first step. We see it as an experiment platform where we can learn what features make the best user experience for people looking for spoken content on the Web," the company said in a frequently-asked-questions page about the Google Audio Indexing project.
Google is beginning with political information because it's trying to become a prominent part of the democratic process and because political speeches receive a lot of attention, the company said. Also, presumably because politicians generally don't mumble as much as the rest of us, the speech recognition technology performs better, Google said.
(Via Google Operating System.)
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