An app offering real-time translations is to allow people in Japan to speak to foreigners over the phone with both parties using their native tongue. NTT Docomo - the country's biggest mobile network - will initially convert Japanese to English, Mandarin and Korean, with other languages to follow. It is the latest in a series of telephone conversation translators to launch in recent months. Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft are among those working on other solutions. The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism.

TCP, the transmission control protocol, is one of the core protocols governing the Internet: If counted as a computer program, it's the most widely used program in the world. One of TCP's main functions is to prevent network congestion by regulating the rate at which computers send data. In the last 25 years, engineers have made steady improvements to TCP's congestion-control algorithms, resulting in several competing versions of the protocol: Many Windows computers, for instance, run a version called Compound TCP, while Linux machines run a version called TCP Cubic. At the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication this summer, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing will present a computer system, dubbed Remy, that automatically generates TCP congestion-control algorithms. In the researchers' simulations, algorithms produced by Remy significantly outperformed algorithms devised by human engineers.

Language barriers are starting to crumble. This month Japan's dominant mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo, introduced the world's first app for real-time voice translation. When a user with a DoCoMo smartphone places a call through the app, he speaks in Japanese and his words are promptly translated into English, Mandarin, or Korean. To complete the conversational circuit, the other person's words are translated from any of those languages back into Japanese. With this debut we've taken one step closer to building a mechanical Babel fish, the extraordinarily useful creature imagined by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

An independent Windows Phone developer has created an app for Microsoft's mobile platform that will attempt to outmatch Apple's intelligent voice-controlled assistant Siri. Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone is a free ad-free mobile app that can perform similar tasks to the iOS 5 voice assistant. "Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The transcribed text is analyzed for patterns to detect commands or general queries. Commands are interpreted and routed to routine phone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions," said Shai Leib, the app's developer, told WPcentral.

Two weeks ago, Janna Van Hoven tried to download "The Golden Girls" theme song as a ring tone for her new cell phone. After an hour of fiddling with her phone, she gave up, unsure if the ring tone was even available. She wanted it as a reminder of her college days, when she sat around with her friend watching the television show. "I wanted that ring tone so it would play when my friend called me. But I had to go through different menus and search through all the songs and sometimes it was hard to find the search option," said Van Hoven, 26, of San Francisco.

If you've ever been struggling with a foreign language dictionary abroad, wishing that you could simply speak into a machine and have your chat translated for you, NTT (News - Alert) Docomo may be ready to make your wish come true. The company, which is Japan's number one cell phone carrier is about to begin offering a new real-time speech-to-speech translation service that you can use both in person and over the phone during a call, according to Geek.com According to Japanese news services, the solution is the first automated chat translation service in the world that is available on a standard cell phone. The new product combines several cutting-edge technologies: advanced speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech conversion of the translated results, says Geek.com. The services to power the solution will be cloud-based, says NTT Docomo.

An Amazon application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) emerged Saturday. The original application, which was first revealed in a Business Insider report, requests the FCC for a five-month experimental Special Temporary Authority to operate on selected channels on some mobile bands. This is the first time that news has emerged about Amazon working on mobile technology. Could it be that the company is secretly working on an Amazon Alexa smartphone? It wouldn't be a completely outlandish notion, even if it's true.

Drones took up a lot of floor (and air) space at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, but one of the most impressive displays of new drone tech came from Qualcomm. The chipmaker showed off the latest iteration of its Snapdragon Flight Drone Platform, which allows for flight control and machine learning in real time onboard a drone. With machine learning, drones can fly autonomously without knowing beforehand what they might encounter. Other drones have artificial intelligence that can do things like follow a moving object or avoid obstacles too, but Qualcomm's tech shows more advanced computing that can actually understand what the drone encountered in mid-air and create a flight path. Qualcomm put together a set at its booth at CES that resembled the inside of a cluttered warehouse, showing how its drone processing and decision-making technology is nimble enough to allow drones to operate indoors and in unpredictable settings without using any GPS.

Samsung Galaxy S8 is tipped to launch by the third week of April, reports reveal. Ahead of the launch, rumors regarding the flagship device is making rounds on the internet regarding the display, camera set-up, battery, storage capacity and more. Well, there's one very interesting feature the Galaxy S8 is confirmed to come packed with, guess what? Well, Samsung Galaxy S8 will be equipped with a newly developed digital assistant called - Bixby. Being just a rumor all this while, Samsung finally confirms Bixby's arrival.

Google's secretive X R&D lab, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, has pulled the plug on its drone project that would bring internet access to millions of people – Project Titan. It has been confirmed by Alphabet that engineers were told to look for other positions within the Alphabet/Google community. Although the project has been killed, the mission is still alive – the firm will continue to use Project Loon as a way to connect rural and remote areas of the world. X, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, has pulled the plug on its project that would bring internet access to millions of people – Titan. The news was first reported by 9To5Mac, which received a statement from an X spokesperson.