Translating telephone technology (where you speak in English and your Japanese friend hears you in Japanese, and vice versa) is commonly used for many language pairs. It is a routine capability of an individual’s personal computer.
missTwo blind graders agree (D7, rule D16). Not in the audit sample (D11).
Grader A: miss
Translating telephones were not in common use in 2009. Google Translate's experimental conversation mode appeared only in January 2011, and machine translation had poor grammatical accuracy until the 2016 neural switch. Speech translation was not a routine PC or phone capability by 2014.
Test: At least 20% of users routinely making translated phone calls: under 5% in 2009 and 2014.
Google Translate (Wikipedia) (retrieved 2026-09): Conversation mode was experimental from January 2011; statistical MT with poor grammatical accuracy until 2016.
Grader B: miss
No translating telephone was in common use in 2009. Skype Translator appeared only as a preview in late 2014, and Google Translate had no call translation.
Test: User test: <5% using phone-call translation by 2014.
Wikipedia: Google Translate (accessed 2026-09-28): Speech translation April 2010; Conversation Mode Jan 2011 (English-Spanish only); camera sign translation 2015; no phone-call translation.
All captured fields
rank
58
kind
decade_prediction
section
Communication
subject
Two-way translating telephones common
target year
2009
timing
in
position
Chapter 9, "2009"; item Communication 1 in Kurzweil 2010, p. 50
confidence
high
note
Wording as reproduced by the author in "How My Predictions Are Faring" (2010); book page not given there. Subject label is the essay's own item heading.