The presentation above is from Day 2 of the recent Google I/O Conference; it previews Google Wave, due out sometime later this year.
In a nut, I was pretty impressed with the scope of channels Google Wave expands for real time communications. I won't rehash a summary of the features. For that, PCMag has posted a pretty good summary here.
Suffice to say, I'm looking forward to it. I've signed up to be informed about the rollout and am already thinking about some of the possibilities for online learning support and how I might be able to integrate Wave down the road with MindBridj. (MindBridj is a new venture I recently started and haven't really said much about yet. More later. (??))
So, rather than rehash all the features of Google Wave in this post, I simply want to highlight the one feature that impressed me even more than the others. It's called Rosie.
What I Love About Rosie
The reason Rosie impresses me is because it addresses one of the pain points I see with social media at the moment. That is, how do I connect with someone on, say,Twitter or Facebook who speaks only French? Or only Spanish? While I speak primarily English?
Wouldn't you agree there's a language barrier today (time zone differences aside) that prevents many of us from communicating globally in real time?
Rosie may change that.
Who Is Rosie?
Rosie is a "bot."
What it (she?) does is translate.
Rosie speaks about 40 different languages. Her main role in Google Wave is to translate discussions between participants who speak different languages.
In the demo above, Lars Rasmussen (Google Maps-guy) and his team showed a chat feature in which one participant, chatting in English, had the text of his message showing up, as French, in another user's window. And vice versa. All this in real time.
Now, I have no illusions that some words won't (yet) translate 100%. But, my philosophy is, if you don't start, we ain't never gonna arrive. This is a great step in the right direction and builds upon the milestones already previously established by other translator services, such as Google's existing Translate service.
See Rosie In Action
If you want to see the demo without sitting through the entire 80 minutes of video, then scrub forward to about time code 1:13:00. (Maybe a little before that.) It's toward the end. Not surprisingly, they chose to close their demo with Rosie.
And, if that piques your curiosity, here are some other timecodes I also found interesting:
- 0:08:40 to 0:10:15 - demo of new functionality in email-type threaded conversations.
- 0:20:45 to 0:23:00 - demo that shows possibilities for live blogging interactivity.
- 0:57:35 - "twave". (What else? No app is complete these days without a Twitter API.)
- 1:12:55 - the Rosie demo.
If you check it out, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'd especially enjoy hearing from some of you who are in any way involved with training, coaching or learning.
