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IBM Strives For 'Superhuman' Speech Tech
robyn217 writes "IBM unveiled new speech recognition technology today that can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it on the fly, and even create on-the-fly subtitles for foreign-language television programs. One of the projects perpetually monitors Arabic television stations, dynamically transcribing and translating any words spoken into English subtitles. Videos can then be viewed via a web browser, with all transcriptions indexed and searchable."
however the researchers stated "We still can't figure out what Bob Dylan is saying"
I'm afraid this type of technology will be used as an exuse for people not to learn foreign languages, which is a shame.
It's not until you learn another foreign language that you realise how complex languages are, and how subtle. Learning another language can literally change the way you think about things.
This type of technology will make people think they completely understand a foreign language, but they won't. Their understanding will be crude, without the subtleties and cultural understanding.
I can speak English and Spanish fluently, and if I watch an English film with Spanish subtitles I'm always thinking - damn, they missed a good joke there, they got that wrong, etc. (Equally so with a Spanish film with English subtitles). And film subtitles are done by professional translators. God only knows what a terrible job a computer would make of film translation.
May be IBM is going to make speech recognition true, but Bill Gates said that this was posible a long time ago. Simply genius.
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
Sometimes you need rather a large context to disambiguate: is this sentence part of a discussion on shore-front management, or spoken language understanding?