The Street View on Russia

Welcome to Russia! You can now virtually travel through the world’s largest country to the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg using Google Maps Street View.

Take an online stroll around famous Red Square and Moscow Kremlin, or go to outskirts of Moscow to wander around the beautiful Tsaritsino or Kuskovo parks. You can also visit the former site of the palace in Kolomenskoye, once considered the 8th World Wonder.


Red Square, Moscow


St. Petersburg, the second largest city in Russia and northernmost megapolis in the world, was once a country capital, and the history of this young city started with The Peter and Paul Fortress. Today, the entire historical center of St. Petersburg is a UNESCO Heritage Site that you can enjoy via Street View.


Historical Center, St. Petersburg


Within St. Petersburg, you can see the great palaces and parks that Russian emperors and nobles built, with Peterhof being its crown jewel. In fact, whole southern shore on the Gulf of Finland consists of palaces and parks including Peterhof, the Oranienbaum, and Alexandria.


 

Peterhof, St. Petersburg

We hope you enjoy your virtual trip to Russia, and look forward to sharing more countries, cultures and sites as Street View continues to expand to more places. For a demo on how Street View works, start here.

Also, if you have a story to share about a place in Russia, find it in Street View and share it on Google+ with the #streetview.

Conversation with Google Translate for Android

 

Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other. But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.

Earlier this year, we launched an update to Google Translate for Android with an experimental feature called Conversation Mode, which enables you to you translate speech back and forth between languages. We began with just English and Spanish, but today we’re expanding to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

To use Conversation Mode, speak into your phone’s microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you’ve said and read the translation out loud. The person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you.

This technology is still in alpha, so factors like background noise and regional accents may affect accuracy. But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more. We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.

We’ve also added some other features to make it easier to speak and read as you translate. For example, if you wanted to say “Where is the train?” but Google Translate recognizes your speech as “Where is the rain?”, you can now correct the text before you translate it. You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.

When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view.

 

Tap the magnifying glass icon to view translations full screen.

Finally, we’ve also optimized the app for larger screens like your Android tablet.

While we work to expand full Conversation Mode to even more languages, Google Translate for Android still supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them.

Download the Google Translate app in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 2.2 and up.