A device that can effortlessly translate between languages has been a fixture in science fiction books and movies for decade.

Google has taken a giant step to making this technology a reality with an upgrade to the Google Translate application being released on Wednesday, reports the New York Times.

The primary upgrade is a voice tool that uses a microphone on a smartphone to enable a flowing conversation between the Google Translate app user and a person speaking a different language by translating between two languages. The voice control is not new but the latest version reportedly works more seamlessly than previous iterations.

The new version identifies who is talking based on the language being spoken. If you want to order an entrée at an authentic Mexican restaurant, you could walk into the restaurant and, with your mouth close to the phone's microphone, speak your request in English after which a robotic voice would speak your request in Spanish.

If the restaurant server asks you a question about your order in Spanish, the smartphone would relay it to you in English. Your English response would be spoken by the phone app in Spanish again.

The app isn't perfect. In tests, the best results were with short sentences and a pause between translations.

The most impactful tool in the translator app upgrade is a visual translator. You can place a sign or text in a foreign language in the phone's viewfinder as though you are taking a picture of it and receive an instantaneous translation on the screen.

The visual scanner technology comes from Word Lens, an app developed by Quest Visual-the company that Google acquired in May.

Google Translate uses software to "crawl" the web in search of content that has been translated between languages. It performs statistical analysis of likely translations. For example, if the software detects that the Spanish word coche has been translated to car millions of times and in various contexts, it reasons that coche means car, and thereby "learns" that word.

Google has been working on translation since 2001. The Google Translate app now boasts 90 languages and about 500 million monthly users. Barak Turovsky, the product leader for Google Translate, told the New York Times that the app dishes out approximately one million translations a day and that 95 percent of the translation technology users live outside the U.S.

Google is just one of many companies developing translation technology. Microsoft's video calling service Skype launched a Skype Translator program on Dec. 15 that translates spoken English and Spanish in real time.

In 2013, Japanese wireless network NTT DoCoMO debuted its "Intelligent Glass" that can translate written text into different languages and display the translation instantly in front of your eyes.