Alec Ross, Former Senior Advisor to Hillary Clinton and the Author of The Industries of the Future:

In ten years, the deaf and mute will be able to speak, and everybody reading this article will be conversant in dozens of foreign languages, eliminating the very concept of a language barrier. Professional translators argue that local dialects, inflections, and nuance are too complex for computers to ever account for sufficiently. But they are wrong.

Today’s translation tools were developed by computing more than a billion translations a day for over 200 million people. With the exponential growth in data, that number will soon signify the number of translations made in an afternoon, then in an hour. Massive amounts of language data will go in and out. As the amount of data that informs translation grows exponentially, the machines will grow exponentially more accurate and be able to parse the smallest detail. Whenever the machine translations get it wrong, users can flag the error — and that data too will be incorporated into future attempts. We just need more data, more computing power, and better software. These will come with the passage of time and will fill in the communication gaps in areas including pronunciation and interpreting a spoken response.