Reports have been released confirming Google’s efforts to create software that will translate languages via your new or refurbished cell phone. If successful, this could be on of the biggest breakthroughs in bringing the world together since the Internet itself.

The applications and technologies that Google has released over the past year leave me with no doubt about their abilities to create such a program; the only question is how soon will it be ready. Think about it. Google has already released voice to text translation via Google Voice, phones running Android now have the ability to search via voice, and anyone who has used Google Translate knows that it works remarkably well – in real time! I’d wager that its inevitable Google combines these technologies to eliminate language barriers as we know them.

Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, commented, “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.”