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Star Trek-like 'Phraselator' Helps Police

Posted by samzenpus on from the set-phraselateor-to-drunk dept.

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."

2 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. screw myminicity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Ok, it's done, I'm fed up.

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    Fight fire with fire.

    Support the official Slashdot mymincity page:

    Slashdotcity!/a

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    Technically this is probably illegal, but call me reckless. As I said, I'm pissed off.

  2. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by rtb61 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Cool, water boarding in 365 different languages, one for each day of the year, just what the US military needs.

    --
    Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen