Closer to the real Babel Fish

Automatic text translation from one language to another is getting better and better, conversion of text to speech is getting better, and voice recognition is making ground. At some point in the future we can imagine speaking into a phone in language A, the voice being converted, translated, and converted back into speech in language B at the other end. At that point technology will have replicated Douglas Adam's Babel Fish, as described in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe series of novels.

TechCrunch has an interesting post about how Google has moved a step closer to producing the ultimate Babel Fish. The post reports that Google have enabled their instant chat, Google Talk, to work with translation bots, to enable  instant translation. The image below shows a chat taking place with instant translation between English and Chinese.

We are on the brink of bringing a longstanding part of science fiction to life. In twenty, maybe ten, years, tourism will be fundementally different. Communication is going to open up, resulting in .....???