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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 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.
And what's really stupid is that there are commercial devices available which are bidirectional for under US$600. Sounds like great US military spending.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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