Google’s Robots Released Today

The Google Robotics Division team have come open with what they have been working on, for the past year or so, and are finally ready to release their latest creation to the world. Yes, I know, it was a great surprise for me too, and by the looks of it, it is certain to change the face of things… if only it were true.

Now I’m sad to say that the Robotics Division hasn’t done much lately, or better yet, hasn’t done anything at all. Mostly because it was not created, but there must be some other reasons for its lack of productivity and I promise that I will look into them. Enough with the joking.

Google talkabout announced today that it is releasing its translation bots, 29 of them, to be precise. Don’t think of something that looks like the robots you were used to from the cartoons, when you were little, or from the last Transformers movie, a Google bot is a piece of software that acts as a chat contact and provides some fun or useful functionality.

As you can see in the picture I attached on the left, it is fairly easy to use, all you need to do is add one of the bots, listed below, to your chat and from there on end it will act as a translator for what you write into the selected language. That or you can use it as well as a pocket translator in your Google Talk client for BlackBerry.
The bots are named using two letter language abbreviations, "[from language]2[to language]", as the official Google talkabout blog informs us. Here are the supported language pairs: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en and zh2en.

A tip, via Philipp Lenssen of blogoscoped.com: "To quickly launch Google Talk without any installation, you can bookmark talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout in Firefox. Now go to your bookmark properties by right-clicking the bookmark. In the keyword field enter "talk" (no quotes). Next time, you can just enter "talk" into the browser address bar to launch the chat."

Basically, in order to do it all , you add the en2ru@bot.talk.google.com as a friend and just start with the typing and it’ll start with the translating. A very useful communication tool as I’ve found it to be.

MORE RELATED ARTICLES: Google Talk – the Easy Pretty Pictures Reloaded Google: talkabout it in 20 Languages On GMail and Google Talk Privacy Google’s Webmaster Central Blog Announces… Chatty GMail Out and About