Claiming “substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse,” Google has officially “deprecated” its Translate API. The announcement was made in this surprisingly upbeat blog post regarding “Spring Cleaning” at Google’s Code Group. More details (but no answers) are provided on this page specifically addressing the Google Translate API.

Apparently, in the case of freely provided API access, popularity and frequent amount to “abuse” and certainly lead to an economic burden of sorts. In this post, Adam DuVander at ProgrammableWeb notes that his company’s directory of mashups include 34 services that employ the Google Translate API. This includes “Chat Translator and Speaker for Skype,” which translates instant messages in real-time and uses text-to-speech to “read” incoming messages. I also observed several mobile “speech-to-speech translation” services using Nuance Dragon Dictation on to front-end Google Translation services and then render the output using text-to-speech. My impression was that Google already put a limit on the number of translations it would execute for individual service providers.

I’m having a deja vu about the unilateral discontinuation of a popular service by Google. It is very similar to GOOG411, a freely provided dial-up directory assistance service, which Google stopped offering in November. At the time, I asserted that the service had provided Google with what it needed (a collection of utterances to help fine tune its speech recognition for other products like Voice Search and Voice Actions. At the same time, it was an acknowledgement that it no longer would support free call completion (and phone calls) by the general public. Indeed, the company has been waffling about charging for calls originated through Gmail as part of the Google Voice feature.

Unlike GOOG411, 3rd parties were building their own services and business plans around the Translate API. For Google to discontinue the service unilaterally will either cripple their business plans or send them to another translation API provider. ProgrammableWeb lists a number of automated and human-assisted translation APIs here. Other than Google (which accounts for about six flavors of translation APIs on the list) Microsoft/Bing being the most recognizable brand.

In this blog post, Dana Blankenhorn urges Google to come clean with a longer explanation. Was the service withdrawn do to government pressure? Does it signal erosion in Google’s cost advantage over competitors? Will Google flat out discontinue translation services?

As an alternative to deprecation, I can easily imagine Google re-introducing the service as a product that carries a fee. Today, the API is still part of Google Labs and not subject to charges. My guess is that they will harden it in some way, attach a meter to count the “dips” into its database and transform those “abusers” into customers by attaching fees per word, translation or bundles of translations.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Google, Mobile Speech Apps, Machine Translation, Voice Mashups