I didn’t attend the Google Cloud Next 2019 developer conference last month in person but it turns out I made an appearance anyway.

Google posted my picture on the jumbotron with a quote from an interview about how Bloomberg has integrated Google translation. (Thanks Tom Bluni for the photo!)

I think people underestimate how much machine translation will change the world. Most of us grew up reading a hometown newspaper. Now we may read national papers or specialized web sites. But most of us still only read languages we can speak.

As machine translation gets better and better we will be reading seamlessly from publications all over the world and we’ll look back thinking how small the world used to be.