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Star Trek-like 'Phraselator' Helps Police
coondoggie writes "Yet another Star Trek-like device is making its way into the real world. VoxTec's Phraselator name sounds a bit like something the Three Stooges might have used long ago but no, this PDA-like device was developed through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for use in Afghanistan and Iraq by American soldiers for communicating with locals who spoke Farsi, Dari, Pashto and other languages. It is now being used as one tool to help keep the peace between English and non-English speakers by police departments in California, Florida, Nevada. In a nutshell the $2,500 ruggedized Phraselator runs an Intel PXA255 400mHz processor that supports a built-In noise canceling microphone, a VOCON 3200 Speech Recognizer, 1GB removable SD card, 256MB of DRAM Memory and 64MB Flash Memory. It can store up to 10,000 phrases."
The cops should just charm all the evil babes that fighting them in gladitorial combat, and sleep with them.
this PDA-like device was developed through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for use in Afghanistan and Iraq by American soldiers for communicating with locals who spoke Farsi, Dari, Pashto and other languages. It is now being used as one tool to help keep the peace between English and non-English speakers by police departments in California, Florida, Nevada.
IM IN UR PDA, TRANSLATIN' UR WORDS
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"I thought she was asking for sex, turns out she just wanted directions to the 7-11. Oopsies!"
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
The summary is the first 3 paragraphs of the article and, not surprisingly, fails to summarize the article. So when you actually go and read the article you get the feeling that maybe it is an example of how poor automatic translation is, as the article has incredibly horrid grammar.. to the point that the whole second half of the article makes no sense.
Oh, and when you finally do figure out what the hell this article is about, it's boring as hell.. who cares about a mobile language translator device with text-to-speech that doesn't even do speech recognition? Travelers have been able to pick up such technology for $50 for a decade now.
Yawn.
How we know is more important than what we know.
VoxTec's marketing department should be summarily dismissed for coming up with that one.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is pretty good, but it still doesn't solve the problem that the officer can't understand the other individual. This could lead to some problems. Now, an officer may wait for backup that speaks the language, or proceed forward knowing that he/she cannot understand the other person and vice-a-versa.
Now, due to this device, officers could think they are making themselves clear, and behave differently, (i.e. I said get down, and I said it in your language, now get down or I shoot), but the other side could be saying something important and can't be understood.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
My hovercraft is full of eels
"My hovercraft is full of eels"
WHAT??
Citizen: Someone's planted a bomb in there!
Phraselator: "Somebody set up us the bomb."
Soldier: What you say!!
Hm, Sounds like the DARPA version of the babelfish. now if only it could be placed inside everyone's ear
I am not sure those two sides will want to know what the other is saying... Does it work two ways? It seems like it would be more helpful but also more cumbersome as a dialog.
I only hope Alexander Yalt isn't involved. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao/
The reason they're not using it in all major cities is simple,... it won't translate jive . So it's useless in the ghetto,... I guess we'll still have to look for little, old, white ladies that speak jive!
Aliens: "Bak Bak, BaBa Bak Bak, BAK BAK BAK"
Translator: "We come in peace, we mean you no harm!"
"See? They mean us no harm!"
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
like Français, Deutsch, or Español?
The original "Airplane!" movie (1980) called. It wants its joke back.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Damn, and I thought my 3.4 GHz Core 2 Duo was fast! This thing can do voice recognition at 400 millihertz clock speed!!
My guess is no. 10,000 phrases might sound like alot, but I can imagine that they would get used up very quickly. Sounds like the only application for this is for police to give commands. With the speech recognition software, not only would only a handful of people be able to use it, but they would also have to know the limits of the device, as far as how fast you can talk, what extent of a vocabulary it has, and so on.
The writing in this article is total crap, the author needs a Englishlator. If you haven't read it yet don't bother, it will hurt your brain and make you dumber.
Iraq billions
Todos son de su base nos pertenece
Toutes vos bases sont nous appartiennent
Ihre Basis sind gehören zu uns
Al uw uitvalsbasis zijn bij ons horen
Tutti sono la base appartengono a noi
Toda a sua base são pertence a nós
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I thought intel had sold off their xscale business to Marvell.
DON'T PHRASE ME BRO!
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Why can't they just teach the cops to say "Prepare to be tased" in a few different languages?
Yet another Star Trek-like device is making its way into the real world. VoxTec's Phraselator name sounds a bit like something the Three Stooges might have used long ago...
What, did I miss a bunch of 3-Stooges Sci Fi episodes? I don't get it. I don't remember Moe poking aliens in their 7 eyes, and the like.
Table-ized A.I.
I read thais as a star trek item with a VOGON 3200 Speech Recognizer.
Vogon would be pretty impressive.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
What the hell is a noise canceling microphone?
http://www.voxtec.com/ - (flash w/ sound warning)
It'll be my first time.
Now we just need to supply golden armor to all of our troops. Suddenly, peace will break out as everybody tries to figure out how to finally leave Tatooine...
Who needs loudness. The distinct "clink-clunk" of a weapon being cocked is universally understood to mean "get on the fucking ground before I blow your head off". Anything else is just pillow-talk.
Actually, now that I think about it, judging by the videos I've seen on TV, that's the universal language for anywhere EXCEPT America, where a weapon being cocked seems to mean "please come and argue with me some more".
>> a VOCON 3200 Speech Recognizer :-)
A VOGON 3200 speech recognizer? Don't the Vogons use Babel Fish like the rest of us?
So this is a ruggadized Pocket PC (like they use in the automotive section of Wal-Mart) with custom voice recognition software.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Part of the problem that may never be solved is the lack of direct translations many languages have between each other.
Still, we never had to worry about the phraselator giving information to the insugents. And the phraselator never had to worry about lying to his family about working for us. Sooo... a win/win! 'Cept all that war, violence, and suffering.
THL phish sticks
i think they can do better with this much of computing power. say , like voice to process to text to voice.little Annanova?
"The helmet now has an integrated translator. That's how they can communicate with the Aliens." "How'd the NoxGuards communicate with the aliens before then?" "They beat 'em up."
A VOGON 3200 Speech Recognizer?
Does it read poetry?
Never let it do that.
SOMEwhere in there is an embedded, county/parish/municipality based digitized asshole:
Contempt Modes
CM1 "SCUMBAG, get ON the GROUND NOW, or i WILL DROP YOU."
CM2 "Turn the FUCK around. PUT your DAMNED hands UP."
CM3 "FREEZE, MOTHERFUCKAH.*"
CM4 "Don't FUCKIN' LIE TO ME, PEDRO/Patel/Nguyen/(sub a name you want)I'm gonna deport your ass."
CM5 "Go back where you came from..."
(As someone given false tickets at least 1 time by local police and TWO times by CHP, and nearly screwed by the judges on the case/docket, I can say contempt of cop is NOT something you want to engage in.)
* (When I part-timed at Emporium in 1989 in Almaden (back then, mostly white, not Asian, neighborhood) there was a theft in progress. Loss Prevention (Caucasian) were in hot pursuit scaling and hopping escalators and chasing the suspects/shoplifters (Black) and not gaining on them. (They were WAY too fast to be caught). Angry, one of the shorter LP yelled "FREEZE, MOTHAFUCKA!! This thin, old, short white lady nearly fainted when she heard the words. I think she wasn't bothered by the hot foot pursuit. I think the profanity stunned her, hehehe...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
PXA255 400mHz
I don't know, maybe they should get one of them new-fangled Intel chips that's rumored to do a full processor cycle in *under* two seconds?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
dude, I read you had problems with ubuntu fubaring MS's MBR and I thought you should see this over at arsgeek
http://www.arsgeek.com/?p=3340
really what you should do if you wanted to use Linux + MS is run linux or Windows under a VM like Virtualbox. it gets to be a pain to keep having to boot back and forth between them after a while and really it isnt worth fubaring your boot record *again* just to have them both. w/ the VM you can run both OS's programs "natively" [w/out wine or cygwin] at nearly native speed in the VM. if you VM windows under linux the only thing you need to do to use it after you install is to add your userid to the vboxusers group. other than that, it works nicely. I would have posted this in your journal but that's archived by now- no new posts allowed.
Noise-cancelling microphone.
Ok, now before techies start calling me an idiot, I know what a noise-cancelling microphone is, but I thought it sounds a little funny and contradictory. After all, aren't microphones supposed to *detect* noise?
Ok, I'll shut up now.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
... so it will be able to show useful messages such as "O RLY?", "YA RLY!", full collection of lolcats, shock sites, giant emoticons and recordings of recent Fox News broadcasts for trolling purposes, photos of Iwo Jima flag and other similar images. To facilitate responses it should also include gang signs with translations, images of fast food and various versions of "Yankees, go home!" phrase, Fall of Saigon photo, multiplication table, and large amount of porn. This improved version of the device will be able to facilitate meaningful dialogue between American soldiers and foreign population, and also useful for communication between police and immigrant and/or poor communities in US.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
...like all translation devices up to day:
Police: Ok Stan, this is a dangerous situation but our new Phraselator 4000 will deal with the situation, just talk into the mike:
Stan: Everything will be just fine, just drop your weapons.
Phraselator 4000: Every Bill be Your time, you topless weapon.
Terrorist: Allah will punish you, infidel!
Phraselator 4000: Allah will puke you, insurance!
Stan: (looks at the other officers and talks)
Stan: This is your second and final warning, drop down your weapons - NOW!
Phraselator 4000: Piss is your semicolon and finally warm, top down groove you weapon - HOW?
Stan: I don't think this is working, sir...
Phraselator 4000: I don't think, piss is lurking, sir...
Stan: Will you shut that useless piece of cr*p down!!
Terrorist: In soviet russia - camel piss on you!
(*everyone fires their guns, Phraselator 4000 has saved the day - once again*)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Darmack and Gillard at Tenagra! Shaka, when the walls fell.
I was wondering what technology helps phone pranksters sound like other people. If this story hadn't run about 4 years ago I would have gotten a lot more scared and pissed when people crank called me using someone else's voice.
(and I even knew about the AppleCat, duh this technology has been commercially available since the 80's)
400 millihertz? That's like one operation every seven minutes.
All your base are belong to us.
You are on the way to destruction.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
That and other devices people have linked to don't support anywhere near the number and diversity of languages the Phraselator does. It may not be the greatest translator ever designed, but it supports a lot more than any other device I've seen: http://www.voxtec.com/phraselator/language_libraries
Then you'll want the self-contained unit that runs off of hot grits.
By the Three Stooges you can also refer to Chakotay (Moe), Harry Kim (Larry) and Tom Paris (Curly) of the Starship Voyager.
http://www.cynicscorner.org/voy_7/voy_701.html
There is no sig.
FTA:
"The device doesn't to straight voice-to-voice translations but for example in the police department's multi-lingual officers translate and record standard issue police commands, such as the Miranda rights, and other questions, that beat officers can retrieve and broadcast"
So they bought $2500 mp3 players?
USS Enterprise.
Hey, this alien book says "how to serve man" - they must really like us!
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Transportelator
Photon torpedolator
Holodeckelator
Tractelator Beam
Tricordelator
Warpelator Drive
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
In my travels I've found that learning just a few phrases of a local language makes people more friendly towards you. In the extreme I learn only "hello", but usually I spend an hour a night for a few weeks learning enough to get basic parts of the language down. Am I fluent? Hell no. Can I communicate? Barely. Are people willing to try and help me more than if I just came and started babbling in English? Yes. Just a few words in their language transforms me from the stupid American into someone who respects their culture.
Somehow I think that I'd still be considered a stupid American if I talked into a box the did that translated basic phrases for me. Maybe part of being a modern soldier should be learning the local language so the locals are more accepting of you.
Hobby Robotics
Translating between related languages (such as western European languages which all derive mostly from Latin) is often a case of translating each word and re-arranging the sentence a little. It might sound a bit funny but will convey the meaning. Thus, all the translation software needs is a dictionary and some rules about converting word order in sentences.
Translating between unrelated languages, such as English to Japanese, is much harder. Not only are the words different, but so are all the forms for expressing ideas. In English you might say "John is here", but in Japanese you would effectively say "as for John, here exists." In English you say "John has that book," in Japanese it becomes "at John that (other) book exists." (In Japanese you can say "that book you have" or "that other book", but just generally "that book".) The translation software has to actually understand the meaning of what is being said, in order to re-phrase it in the context of the target language.
In fact, you do get a bit of that even in European languages. For example, in English we say "I am lost," but the French say "I have lost myself."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, now the cops can really make sure you understand them before they shoot you! Never forget Amadou Diallo!!!!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I will not buy this record. It is scratched!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I would just like to thank the one who came up with the article tag "myhovercraftisfullofeels". Hilarious :)
One issue I can see coming from this: let's take the Spanish language as an example. I can tell you from personal experience that the Spanish you're likely to hear on the street will, at times, not resemble anything you've ever heard back in high school Spanish (thanks to slang and other factors). Not only that, but Spanish isn't going to be the same everywhere; there are many different dialects on this common language (hell, even East L.A. has it's own dialect, no joke); I'm not just talking about slang, I'm actually talking about slights forks in the language. If this cyber-translator is geared more toward Castellan Spanish, for example, and your subject grew up in Cuba or South Texas then the phrase "lost in translation" is going to take on a life of its own. If we're running into this issue on just one language then imagine trying to translate various common dialects of several different languages...
This space for rent!
They've gone through a couple hardware revisions over the years; truth be told this product is really 4-5 years old. It's main claim to fame is a speaker can speak natively into the microphone, and the program *should* spit back English. Should is the operative word there.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
WTF?? That sentence made my head hurt. What was there a shortage on punctuation marks or something?
But will the phraselator work as a Shizzelator!!
A tobacconist's shop.
Text on screen: "In 1970, the British Empire lay in ruins, and foreign nationalists frequented the streets - many of them Hungarian (not the streets - the foreign nationals). Anyway, many of these Hungarians went into tobacconists' shops to buy cigarettes ..."
A Hungarian tourist (John Cleese) approaches the clerk (Terry Jones). The tourist is reading haltingly from a phrase book.
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it is scratched."
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it is scratched."
Clerk: "Uh, no, no, no. This is a tobacconist's."
Hungarian: "Ah! I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched."
Clerk: "No, no, no, no. Tobacco ... um ...
cigarettes." (holds up a pack)
Hungarian: "Ya! See-gar-ets! Ya! Uh ... my
hovercraft is full of eels."
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "My hovercraft ..." (pantomimes
puffing a cigarette) "... is full of eels." (pretends to strike
a match)
Clerk: "Ahh, matches!"
Hungarian: "Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant ... do you waaaaaant ... to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
Clerk: "Here, I don't think you're using that thing right."
Hungarian: "You great poof."
Clerk: "That'll be six and six, please."
Hungarian: "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? I ... I am no longer infected."
Clerk: "Uh, may I, uh ..." (takes phrase
book, flips through it) "... Costs six and six ... ah, here we
are." (speaks weird Hungarian-sounding words)
Hungarian punches the clerk. Meanwhile, a policeman (Graham Chapman) on a quiet street cups his ear as if hearing a cry of distress. He sprints for many blocks and finally enters the tobacconist's.
Cop: "What's going on here then?"
Hungarian: "Ah. You have beautiful thighs."
Cop: (looks down at himself) "WHAT?!?"
Clerk: "He hit me!"
Hungarian: "Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait 'til lunchtime." (points at clerk)
Cop: "RIGHT!!!" (drags Hungarian away by the arm)
Hungarian: (indignantly) "My nipples explode with delight!"
Scene switches to a courtroom. Characters are all in powdered wigs and judicial robes, except publisher and cop.
Characters: Judge - Terry Jones; Bailiff - Eric Idle; Lawyer - John Cleese; Cop - Graham Chapman; Publisher - Michael Palin.
Bailiff: "Call Alexander Yalt!" (voices sing out the name several times)
Judge: "Oh, shut up!"
Bailiff: (to publisher) "You are Alexander Yalt?"
Publisher: (in a sing-songy voice) "Oh, I am."
Bailiff: "Skip the impersonations. You are Alexander Yalt?"
Publisher: "I am."
Bailiff: "You are hereby charged that on the 28th day of May, 1970, you did willfully, unlawfully, and with malice of forethought, publish an
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Make the box do basic voice recognition of standard English for 1,000 common phrases and make it capable to play the audio clip of the tranlation into one or more target languages. How hard is that?
Somebody please make one and mass market it. And make it updatable via USB.
However, your final sentence is (essentially) nonsensical.
"Modern" soldiers enlist for a period of "active duty" with a length of two to four years. Let's assume the average length of an active duty period is three years (though when I was in, I think four year enlistments were the norm, since all the "goodies"--enlistment bonus, max college money--went with a four year hitch). For the simplest job in the Army, an infantry rifleman, basic training lasts 14 weeks, or approximately four months (you likely have a "zero week" at the beginning and leave at the end of the 14 weeks of training). So you've already used up a quarter of the first year just learning a limited set of skills (BRM, a bit of hand-to-hand, etc.)
To get a functional/useful to a soldier grip on a new language is the study of at least a year. By "useful" I mean that the soldier must have the ability to both ask questions and understand the answers given in the second language, something far more complex than being able to ask for directions to the bathroom or give a polite greeting.
I spent three years stationed in Italy with the 82nd, during which I spent almost all my free time off base exploring the country. I also spent a lot of time at the houses of two good friends who were married to Italian girls. On top of this, I'd had two years of Spanish in high school (a related romance language) as a background. Despite all that, I only made enough progress in the language to ask for a drink and understand basic directions. When some Italian started talking fast about something outside the two topics I had a basic understanding of, I was lost. No amount of "parli lentimente, per favore" was going to help that.
Expecting the military to pay for a non-specialist soldier to learn an new language for a year is unrealistic, to say the least.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
While it certainly seems to be an odd choice for ruggedizing this device, I can see how certain large nutshells would make for quite a sturdy case.
You know what?
Here's one in Finnish:
Farmer: Kokoo kokoon koko kokko!
Farmhand: Koko kokkoko?
Farmer: Koko kokko.
Gather up a whole bonfire!
A whole bonfire?
A whole bonfire.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Who needs weapon cocking? Instead, speak in a monotone brown-note.