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Friday, December 12, 2003
FOUND IN TRANSLATION.
External link: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2002_11_01_archive.html#85665566
Here is an excerpt from the article "UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR" that appeared here, in "The Official Record" more than a year ago, on November 12, 2002:
We have the following four things already:
1) Voice recognition software that converts speech to text.
2) Translation software that translates from English to almost any language or vice-versa.
3) Speech software that converts text to speech.
4) Small hand-held computers that can run all those programs.
So, hey, let's put all those things together, and create a hand-held device that I can talk into in English, and which will translate what I just said into another language, and which I then can have someone else talk into in their language, and hear what they just said in English. I'm sure that I would pay $10,000.00 for a device that could do all that. But there isn't any reason why it should cost more than a couple hundred, and even less than that if millions of us started buying them. Somebody just needs to put all the pieces together.
Here is an excerpt from the current (December 2003/January 2004) issue of MIT Technology Review, from the article "7 Hot Projects":
Automatic speech translator
Company: IBM
Status: Could appear in laptops or personal digital assistants by mid-2004
Some social pundits claim that communication via computer has hampered personal connections. But researchers at IBM are on the verge of using computers to bring people closer together with a system that translates spoken language on the fly. The speech-to-speech effort started a couple of years ago “as an adventurous research project,” says David Nahamoo, manager of the human-language technologies group at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. The group has now built a working prototype: a laptop computer uses speech recognition software to process spoken words into text; sophisticated translation algorithms convert the text into a second language; and then the computer uses text-to-speech technology to “speak” the translated phrase.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2003/12/found-in-translation.html
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