Of course, to be honest, this may not yet affect many individuals.  Google Docs has had enough trouble catching on with English-speaking Americans, never mind people who aren’t in the company’s home market.

That could be kind of the point, though, as the development should encourage more potential users to give Google Docs a try.

So a post on the Google Docs Blog provided a picture of the new tech in action, as you can see below.

The post also explained to the uninitiated, "To begin editing, visit docs.google.com in your mobile browser, and select a document to edit.  Switch from view to edit mode by pressing ‘Edit’ to turn on the mobile editor and start typing away.  As a reminder, mobile editing is available on Android (2.2+) and iOS (version 3.0+) devices."

If you’ve got any ideas about what Google should do next in this field, the company’s welcoming feedback in the comments section and on the Google Docs Help Forum.

This is the technology that analyzes images and PDF files and extracts text and formatting, so you can edit. The feature was introduced last summer. The development of the technology would be aided by scans of ancient texts. 

In August, Google began allowing for file conversion utilizing the technology in Google Docs. It works for PDFs, JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs. 

"Hit upload, and we’ll use this information to search for the right characters in your file," says Google software engineer Jason Schaeffer. "As usual, you will get best results with sharp, high-resolution images or PDF files. This update will also result in an improvement in OCR quality for languages that we’ve supported previously (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish). We’ve also made improvements to the way we import formatting from your documents, and are now doing a better job in preserving font and alignment information."

"We’ll keep adding languages and at at the same time will continue to improve speed and accuracy for the existing ones," says Schaeffer. "In the meantime, we hope you take advantage of this new way to import your data into Google Docs."

More information about the feature, including language information can be found here.

An official blog post – which you can view in Korean here if you like – explained, "Twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile web site are now translated into Korean. . . .  Twitter has also updated the popular Korean versions of Twitter for Android and Twitter for iPhone."

What’s more, the post continued, "[W]e want to thank our partner Daum for displaying top Korean Tweets on their homepage and making it easy to find friends from your Hanmail address book; and LG U+ for working with us to make Twitter available via SMS in Korean for their subscribers (shortcode is #1234)."

Considering that the number of Twitter users in South Korea has already jumped tenfold over the past twelve months, these changes are likely to have a major impact.  South Korea’s fondness for tech is renowned, so assuming Twitter doesn’t bump up against a homegrown service, the adoption rate could be quite high.

That’s exciting news for Twitter’s investors and supporters.  And the development may also present the average user with the opportunity to learn more about North Korea the next time it makes headlines.

Just don’t hold your breath for the next step in Twitter’s global expansion.  Although it of course seems certain that Twitter will launch in another language sooner or later, the official blog post only set "the end of this year" as a target by which to branch out again.

A word of caution: don’t first try out Conversation Mode when money, a legal matter, or food is at stake.  Google – which is usually happy to slap a beta tag on just about anything – warned that the technology is still in alpha.

One more note: at the moment, English and Spanish are the only two languages Conversation Mode is able to handle.

The new tech should be easy to use, however.  A post on the Google Mobile Blog explained, "In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking.  Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud.  Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you."

Justifiably, the post later added, "[W]e’re excited about the future promise of this technology to be able to help people connect across languages."

Today, there are 44 new languages on the figurative table, and that should account for the vast majority of people who are likely to own a smartphone.  An Android device or anything running a recent version of iOS, in fact.

So here’s the full list: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and American), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (for both Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (for both Spain and South America), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu and Vietnamese.

A post on the Official Google Blog also explained, "If your phone’s default language is one of those listed, go to gmail.com in your phone’s browser and the new interface will appear in your language automatically. . . .  You’ll get a bunch of new goodies including offline support, smart links (titles will appear in links for Google Maps, YouTube and Google Docs), the ability to add and remove labels, layout improvements and more – in addition to the existing features like starring, better threaded conversations and search."

This development should help Google win quite a few more fans in the international community.

A post on the Google Research Blog explained the need for this development.  "People in Hong Kong typically use either ‘Cangjie’ or ‘Handwriting’ input methods.  Cangjie has a steep learning curve and requires users to break the Chinese characters down into sequences of graphical components.  The Handwriting method is easier to learn, but slow to use.  Neither is an ideal input method for people in Hong Kong trying to use Google Search on their mobile phones."

Also, "Speaking is generally much faster and more natural than typing."  And "some Chinese characters . . . are used so rarely used that people often know only the pronunciation, and not how to write them."

So Cantonese Voice Search is meant to address these issues, making things easier on users.  It might be considered a "thank you" to Hong Kong’s citizens following the whole mainland China censorship/server switch affair.

Of course, Google isn’t likely to complain if Cantonese Voice Search attracts a few new users at the same time.

Google intends to move forward with its work on other Chinese languages, too.

Let’s first take a look at the four new languages.  According to some admittedly shaky Wikipedia data, 6 million people speak Croatian, 12 million people speak Serbian, and 7 million people speak Slovak.  Then the entry related to the Filipino language indicates that 25 million people speak it as a first language and another 60 million speak it as a second.

Impressive, eh?  Even ignoring that last number, YouTube just became more accessible to something like 50 million individuals.

Also, a post on the YouTube Blog noted, "This brings the grand total of languages we support to 28, a nearly 50% increase since the beginning of 2010.  (And remember: by selecting automated captions on a video, you can experience that video in over 50 languages.)"

As for the future, the post later continued, "By the end of this year, our goal is to offer the YouTube experience in 40 languages, doubling the number we started with at the top of 2010."

Given that there are only four months remaining in the year, that works out to a new language about every ten days.  Language barriers should fall left and right.

The other eight languages are French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, meaning Yahoo’s aiming at some pretty large groups of people.  It doesn’t look like the company plans to just roll out some automated email systems, either, promising "world-class customer care" instead.

In an odd twist, IBM will actually handle the operation, though.  And it’ll do so out of a call center located in Cairo, Egypt.

Amr Talaat, Country General Manager of IBM Egypt, explained his company’s involvement by stating, "The services delivered from this center will help Yahoo!’s Middle East, North African, and European users benefit from the talent pool and customer care solutions deployed here.  It will provide them with best-in-class user experience and customer services that are an industry benchmark."

Dr. Hazem Abdelazim, CEO of Egypt’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency, then added, "Our global offering not only provides reputed multinational companies with a cost-competitive location, but also a location that operates as a multilingual platform for world-class operations."

This could have a significant effect on Yahoo’s popularity.  Individuals and businesses should be much less hesitant to use something when they know real help is just an email or a phone call away.

Obviously, this is an important step forward since it may make Google more popular with a large number of people.  Even Korean-speaking individuals who are also familiar with other languages should appreciate the opportunity to conduct searches in their native tongue.

The development represents a significant step in terms of technological achievements, too, since Korean isn’t the simplest language in the world (Wikipedia indicates that 1,800 hanja characters are taught in South Korean schools).  If Google’s automated translation system can handle it, support for lots of other languages may not be far off.

Anyway, a post on the Google Mobile Blog supplied a shot of Google Search by voice in action, and also stated for the sake of anyone who didn’t know, "Google Search by Voice will be available soon, pre-installed, on the Samsung Galaxy S and the Nexus One.  It is also accessible in the Android Market and via Google Mobile App for the BlackBerry and the iPhone.  You can download Google Mobile App at m.google.com."

The post then continued, "So if you speak Korean, grab your phone and bid Google Search by Voice a hearty Annyeong Haseyo!"

Of course, Google Search by voice remains free.

This isn’t some poorly sourced rumor or random conspiracy theory.  Chris Gourlay interviewed Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, and Och said, "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time."

Incredible as that might seem, the building blocks are already in place.  Android allows users to perform searches by just saying terms out loud.  Google Translate deals in 52 languages at the moment.  Google only needs to integrate everything in order to be in business.  Maybe.

The sentence "I am going to eat lunch at 12:30" becomes "I’m going to lunch at 12:30" after Google Translate takes it from English to Spanish and back.  That’s enough of a difference to create confusion (suppose someone’s trying to distinguish between stuffing his face and stepping out to run errands), and it’s not like Spanish is a rare dialect or the original phrase represents a curveball.

Toss in imperfect speech recognition, and it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to conduct important business or even chat for fun.

Nonetheless, it should be very interesting to see how this project works out for Google.

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