Amber Smith ESL 509

My Google alerts this week were fun articles about how you can make Google translate sound like an old car starting to the reviews of the latest Pixel earbuds. I wasn't sure how I could write an informative Blog post about those topics, so I went back through my alerts. As I scanned them I realized this would Baidu kept recurring day after day! So I decided to look into what exactly all the hype was about.  News to me, Baidu is essentially Google's Search Engine competitor but created in China. So what does Baidu have to do with ESL or language? Well, just like Google has developed some translation software, so has Baidu! The "hype" or popular topic this week is the fact that Baidu claims to have simultaneous instant translation software. I wrote in a previous post about how Google has come out with an augmented reality addition to their Google translate software and Baidu's tool is very similar. Baidu is using artificial intelligence which is what allows for t...

So this week's Google Alert article continues with the same idea as last weeks article on an update to Google translate. Before reading this article this week I didn't know that the update to the current Google Translate application is called augmented translation. I have explored augmented reality in other courses and it is really neat. Well, that is exactly what the translation app is doing it is augmenting the real words to the translated words on your screen! I am clearly still amazed by this awesome technology. Anyways, this weeks article is specifically about MemoQ a translation software company and how they feel augmented translation can change a business but also how humans are involved with this as well. They mention how augmented reality ultimately can save companies valuable time and who doesn't need extra time? I found it interesting though that they comment on how even though this is some state of the art technology that should be great it, that is all based...

This week I found another alert article on the tech tool Google Translate. This tool that I thought was already pretty awesome just got even more awesome! The article is about how Google Translate has added 13 more languages to join the 26 that they already had. Before finding this article I didn't even know that Google Translate had this feature. I had read before that the new Google Glasses would be able to automatically translate street signs, menus etc. but I didn't know that we could already do this with our App on our phones. I only got half way through reading the article when I had to give it a try for myself. It is surprisingly extremely easy to use. You simply choose the camera option, point the camera to words that you want to be translated and like magic it translates them automatically on your phone screen! My husband and I had a great time holding up our even snack's nutrition label to pointing to my computer screen. This is really an amazing tool that I wis...

Welcome to my first blog entry for this course. This isn't my first time blogging but it is my first time blogging my personal thoughts as well as using google alerts for my content. When I looked back at my google alerts, at first I was a little concerned that I may not have chosen the best topic for alerts as I wasn't getting many articles with content that was relevant to me. I finally stumbled upon two articles that caught my interest and seemed relevant to teaching. Both described new technology advances that are similar to Google translate. I currently use Google translate to communicate to the best of my ability with my L2 students, so I thought it would be great to either find out what is new with this current tool or find out more about similar technologies. In the first article by Terena Bell ( https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/is-neural-machine-translation-ready-for-marketing-content/ ) she explained how when Google translate first came about, people tried ...