Linguapax
Meet Google’s Voice Hunter On A Quest For 300 Languages
Google wants Voice Search to master the Tower of Babel. So Linne Ha travels the world, gathering the language samples used to train it.
Google's Voice Search, which launched on cellphones in 2008 and was added to the desktop in June, seems like such a simple proposition. You speak your query into your phone (or computer), and, ta-da, the system pops out an answer.
But teaching Google's voice bot to understand what users are saying isn't simple at all. And if you're trying to get it to speak all the languages in the world, it's even more complicated.
Enter Linne Ha (pictured, right), Google's Voice Hunter. Her official title is "International Program Manager, Google Voice Search," but Ha spends her days crisscrossing the globe, gathering the voice samples needed to train the voice bot, the way a lepidopterist might go hunting for rare butterflies.
Typically, a company would solve this problem by licensing samples from firms that specialize in assembling speech databases. But that wasn't going to work for Google.
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