It’s hard to not get a heady futurebuzz off the developments that Google’s been unveiling in the areas of speech-to-text and language translation lately. We’ve seen the former applied in places like Google Voice voicemail transcriptions, YouTube auto-captioning, and Google voice search in their mobile app while the latter has enabled Google Talk translation bots and dynamically-translated feeds in my Google Reader.
The eventual applications are mindblowing. For starters, advances in speech-to-text will eventually slay keyboards as your main input device for digital conversation. That impact will be huge. But it’s nothing compared to real-time language translation, which spells complete annihilation of the language barrier. People will be able to go through life speaking English, Spanish, French, Klingon or Na’vi and have their words translated into the language of whomever they’re speaking to. Millions of hours of programming that nobody wanted to invest in translating, suddenly available to a truly global audience. There’s lots of cool stuff happening right now, but it’s hard to top the gamechanging impact of all of these innovations.
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In the name of Texas hospitality, I have taken the liberty to assemble, for your RSVPing pleasure, the parties of note during the first half of SXSW (the interactive portion). 
