Google Translate could soon get its own version of Gboard's Rambler

Voice-to-text sounds like a great idea… until you actually listen closely to how people really speak. While we expect the written word to be clear and formal, speech is often anything but — and that’s exactly why we have tools like Rambler in Gboard, able to compensate for our messy utterances. Now Google Translate looks like it could be cooking up a similar system of its own.

Google built Rambler to deal with all the sorts of filler words and backtracking that often prevent our speech from being a literal word-for-word representation of the message we’re attempting to convey. And when we’re trying to translate that message from one language to another, getting those initial words just right can matter a whole lot.

Looking through the changes present in version 10.39.34.995726622.4-release of Google Translate for Android, we’ve spotted some early work towards giving the app what appears to be that same sort of system, here called “Smart assist.” Check out these screens for a preview — you won’t see this yet in the app on your own phone:

Translation settings could soon start offering a choice between a literal word-for-word mode, and this very Rambler-sounding Smart assist. When Smart assist is active, it should sanitize your voice input for nice, clean text that’s all ready to be translated.

That sounds great, but we’ve still got plenty of questions. Compatibility is probably the biggest one — Rambler only supports Pixel 11 devices. Will this be more widely available, or similarly constrained? And what about offline operation?

We can confirm at least one limit that we already know about, as Translate only appears to be planning to support Smart assist in Conversation mode.

In both Listening and Text only modes, users will find the option unavailable.

Even with that minor restriction, this still sounds like a really cool tool that could prove to be potentially very useful — assuming it actually delivers on its promise. We’ve yet to actually see Smart assist in action, though, so the jury on that will have to remain out for at least a little while longer.