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."

Comments

Re:One Way Tool?

[Dutch Gun]

Military (or police) equipment is on a whole different level than most commercial devices when it comes to acceptable tolerances for failure. This process is often described as making a piece of equipment "solder-proof". People who don't understand this need to realize that when lives are literally on the line (for both soldiers and civilians), you often have to pay a premium for both the reliability and/or the specialization needed for military applications. You have to take ALL the specifications into account when comparing products and their price points.