Urdu made easy

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO69307,00.html

The universal translator of Star Trek lore just got one step closer today!

"As Patterson, vice president and chief financial officer at Marine Acoustics Ltd, pushed buttons on what the company calls a Phraselator, the device spit out commands such as "show me your identification" in one after the other of the four predominant languages in Afghanistan, Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Urdu. Then he spoke phrases in English into the device, with translations occurring in a matter of seconds. It was the end result of a crash project Marine Acoustics conducted to take the Phraselator from concept to reality in just six months.

...Marine Acoustics, which is run by retired officers and Naval Academy graduates including Patterson, developed the Phraselator on a handheld computer powered by the Windows CE operating system using voice recognition software from SRI International in Palo Alto, Calif.

...The translator packs a lot of power and information into a tiny device. It can store 1,000 phrases in the four languages on a 20MB compact flash card, and other languages can be supported by other cards. The Afghan unit comes equipped with what Patterson described as a "force protection" language module used by troops operating under potentially hostile conditions. The device also can be quickly adapted to other circumstances with the addition of other modules. For example, a medical module would contain phrases that would help doctors or medics treat patients, he said." Source: Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO69307,00.html

The universal translator of Star Trek lore just got one step closer today!

"As Patterson, vice president and chief financial officer at Marine Acoustics Ltd, pushed buttons on what the company calls a Phraselator, the device spit out commands such as "show me your identification" in one after the other of the four predominant languages in Afghanistan, Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Urdu. Then he spoke phrases in English into the device, with translations occurring in a matter of seconds. It was the end result of a crash project Marine Acoustics conducted to take the Phraselator from concept to reality in just six months.

...Marine Acoustics, which is run by retired officers and Naval Academy graduates including Patterson, developed the Phraselator on a handheld computer powered by the Windows CE operating system using voice recognition software from SRI International in Palo Alto, Calif.

...The translator packs a lot of power and information into a tiny device. It can store 1,000 phrases in the four languages on a 20MB compact flash card, and other languages can be supported by other cards. The Afghan unit comes equipped with what Patterson described as a "force protection" language module used by troops operating under potentially hostile conditions. The device also can be quickly adapted to other circumstances with the addition of other modules. For example, a medical module would contain phrases that would help doctors or medics treat patients, he said." Source: Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz

[JMountford]

This is a very neet technology with just as much Civilian as Military potential. Imagine being able to go to france Having a lapel mic/speaker combination pluged in to your PPC and just speaking normally. Whilst the user speaks an application like this one quickly translates speaking the French version of what is said back to the clerk or whomever was the target of the silly englishman's conversation.

With breakthroughs like what is mentioned in this article it won't be but a few more years. And voice recognition is evolving in leaps in bounds. Soon enough our Pocket PCs will have speach recognition as a selectible input method.