For the near future, Google may be forced to take smaller steps to improve its speech recognition technology. And while live translation has attracted much criticism, for industry analyst Neil Shah, partner and research director on IoT, mobile and ecosystems at Counterpoint, expanding the reach of it is a way for the company to position itself ahead of the competition: “Google has access to two billion Android users,” he says. “It is very well positioned to scale faster than competition, and train with massive flows of input data, as more users start using the latest voice interactions in Android phones.”