A True Love Story That Could Only Happen in Modern Life

This is a love story — and it started with Google Translate. Back in 2010, Mac McClelland was an American in Haiti reporting on the aftermath of the earthquake that year. There, she met her future husband, Nic, a UN peacekeeper from France who spoke no English. They immediately became attracted to each other but struggled to communicate and resorted to hand gestures. So, they turned to Google Translate and slowly began talking and emailing with one another in English, even after they both had left Haiti.

"Seven months after we met in Haiti, we finally saw each other in person again . . . He could speak enough for us to have simple conversations over dinner. He knew so much more English than the first time we'd met," Mac wrote in The Washington Post. "All learned from our interactions. All translated by Google."

A year and a half after they met, the couple communicated well enough that they moved in together in San Francisco. A few months later, they married.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt talked about their love story at a panel today at SXSW — he used it as an example of how machine learning is making a huge impact in everyday people's lives. Something else he could have mentioned — the wow-worthy story of how paramedics delivered a baby on the side of the road using Google Translate's app.