Geek.com is reporting that Google is working on a service that would instantly translate your speech into another language so the person on the other end of a phone call would here the conversation in their own language. This service will be targeted at cell phone users. According to Google the delivery date for this service is two years

Frank Och, head of Google translation services explained to Times Online:

We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.

If this service ever materializes will it make foreign language instruction obsolete?