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Speech-to-Speech Translator Developed For iPhone
Ponca City, We love you writes "Dr. Dobbs reports that Alex Waibel, professor of computer science and language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation. 'Jibbigo's software runs on the iPhone itself, so it doesn't need to be connected to the Web to access a distant server,' says Waibel. Waibel is a leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces, creating the first real-time, speech-to-speech translator for English, German and Japanese. 'Automated speech translation is an expensive proposition that has been supported primarily by large government grants,' says Waibel. 'But our sponsors are impatient to see this technology become more widely available and we, as researchers, are eager to find new revenues that will help us extend this technology to more of the 6,000 languages now spoken worldwide.'"
Waibel is an leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces.
Is Waibel also "an leader" in grammar detection?
My nipples explode with delight !
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Qué?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
If it's not like this already, maybe you could have it display the English phrase it thinks it heard on the screen? Just to avoid misunderstandings.
I was at a noisy pub with a Japanese guy in my course, and when I said goodbye with "see you in the lecture", he responded "see you next year". It wasn't until I was outside that it struck me that he must have thought I said that.
Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation.
I think that should be corrected to "Users speak simply...". When using Google Translate to translate something from Dutch to French or German, I often deliberately make simple sentences that I know can be parsed easily and without having to detect double meanings.
I mean, if Google Translate cannot do a good translation WITHOUT having to interpret sounds to words, then this tech will hardly be any better.
Yeah yeah I should be more positive...
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
If it does, better keep it on the queue-tee and not tell Apple! Seriously, I hope the author releases this for an open (or at least less closed--about the best we have in the phone arena at the moment) platform at some point as well
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
This has been around for few years now on other phones symbion, windows, android by http://www.speereo.com/ Enjoy ;)
If it eventually covers all 6'000 spoken languages, then I will be able to understand the Swedish chef! If harsh language is prohibited, then Klingon will probably be hard to translate.
Star Trek-inspired technology is always cool.
Vamos a arruinar una bonita playa.
MABASPLOOM!
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: [Professor Farnsworth is showing Cubert, his clone, some of his inventions] And this is my Universal Translator. Unfortunately, so far it only translates into an incomprehensible dead language. Cubert J. Farnsworth: [into the translator's microphone] Hello. Universal Translator: Bonjour! Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Crazy gibberish!
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
I'm just wondering whether it would translate for an energy life-form who's in love with Zefram Cochrane.
so all i have to do now go and learn english and i will be speaking spanish amaaaaazing
Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Parece que he perdido mi copia de la guía, pero como yo soy un príncipe de Nigeria, con mucho gusto a comprar uno por $ 10 millones de dólares EE.UU., si usted me ayudará a transferir fondos de mi hermano, que ha robado mi difunto padre trono. Por favor, responda con su información bancaria para que podamos ayudarnos mutuamente.
The Geek in Black
I know my BCD's (when I'm Sober)
gadgets? 'commerce'? being held hostage by who/what we were trained to believe in?
?soon? many of us will have the opportunity to communicate on a higher level, with no gadgets/translation required. the lights are coming up all over now.
Yes, it will be nice not to have play charades with the employees at [insert fast food restaurant here] to get my order.
You can stop adding those "relevant" one-liner comments to your offtopic spams. It's just more work for you and I don't think it manages to fool anyone.
At college, I was tutored by someone who'd done early machine translation work toward his PhD and post-doctoral, and even a decade or two later, he was not impressed by the state of the art.
Since then, I've developed bad RSI, and try very hard not to lose my patience with the slowness and inaccuracies of Dragon.
IOW, theoretical and practical experience point to this tech being an excellent gimmick for people who don't need to do real work at any level of efficiency. Summarises the iPhone in general, really.
... will drive evolution of all languages toward vocabulary and syntax that's less prone to embarrassing or dangerous misinterpretation?
I used to wonder if voice recognition would drive a big shift in pronunciation patterns, but now I expect that automatic voice recognition will outstrip human voice recognition before that can happen. Maybe the same thing will happen with translation, too.
No HD projector, no shaver. Lame
this is where it's at.
I have a friend who is deaf, he uses email and special phone transcription services to talk to people on the phone. So he can only make a call from home with his terminal. Does anyone know if there is an app that will simply do speech to text? He wants to get a cell phone, if nothing else to be able to call 911 if he falls and breaks a hip. (he lives alone and is elderly) He can speak reasonably well, since he became deaf at the age of 13 from spinal meningitis.
It's called "Talk to Me" by Flaviu Negrean, and it currently supports speech-to-speech translation from English to Spanish, French, German and Italian. Works well on my Android 1.6 phone. http://www.androlib.com/android.application.info-fidogames-apps-talktome-zwnB.aspx
It failed to translate sentence: "; abadonar tabla vocablo;
Is this build around the idea that if you speak slowly enough, the other person will understand you? Is it just converting speach read in, into a Captain Kirk mode?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
This is great news, i can finally order a cheeseburger at mcdonalds again without trying to think back to junior high spanish 1 class!
We use the other languages to make fun of you.
I bought the app and said "Marijuana" in English, which promptly spit back out at me in Spanish, "illegales" . I'm pretty sure that translates back into English as , "Illegal".
- Aetheral Research -
When everyone can just speak English?
See, this kind of Anglo-centric thinking gets us nowhere. We can't get everyone in the world to agree to adopt English as their preferred natural language... It'd never work, there would be too much resistance. People don't want to give up their native tongues to speak English.
No. Clearly the way to go is to get everyone to speak Esperanto.
Bow-ties are cool.
What we *really* need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Sir, my first job was making tired old Star Wars references, very similar to your vaporators in most respects. And, please, sir, the Jawas have some lovely merchandise here - may I suggest you allow them to fit you for a stillsuit?
Bow-ties are cool.
And swim? Like the babel fish?
...Kurzweil was right again.
If you have two iPhones, see ...
Speech-to-speech translators have been around for a while; the problem with them is that they don't work well. Imagine the an unholy union between Google Translate and "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer". Or the Hungarian phrase book; it amounts to the same thing.
Making an iPhone version serves two purposes, though: (1) lots of press coverage and (2) lots of user feedback and testing.
Good job on the PR... :-)
When everyone can just speak English?
Ok, which kind of English would you pick? Canadian? Australian? Caribbean? Ghanaese? Indian? Scots? Or one of the countless creole dialects and pidgins? It is one of the few languages that has never been officially reformed or standardized, so it is essentially... multiple languages. Exactly what you criticised.
Languages evolve to reflect the mindset of their speakers. Even if one had the means to eradicate all languages except some form of Standard English, it would instantly break up into ca. 6000 branches again.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
i've had an app like this on my android phone for at least a month. how is this news?
Spiral out. Keep going...
There is no way to make an automatic translator that will work decently with Japanese. Maybe the simplest short phrases will work out okay but anything with any complexity is going to produce nonsense most of the time. This is especially so when translating speech from J to E due to the large amount of homophones and the required contextual understanding to figure out what word is being used. This is just marketing vaporware.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
You mean Dr. Dobbs is still around?
I thought the waibelfish goes INSIDE the ears?
http://www.advanced-media.co.jp/
I'm not affiliated with this company based in Tokyo, but I've tested myself their EngJp translation soft and was very impressed (uses a mobile as emitter and receiver and a server to process data).
I bought this app yesterday, it works, but it's very slow on my iPhone (which is a normal 3G, not a 3GS).
Just a warning. It takes about 20 seconds to start the app, another 10-20 seconds for it to decode what you said, and another 10-20 seconds to translate it.
I think the 1 minute round-trip time might be a bit of a bummer if you're trying to have a conversation.
Also, to be able to have the person you talk to respond, you have to switch languages which means restarting the app.
Unless they come out with a speedier version, I need a faster iPhone!
This is impossible, unless there is some sort of delay, .. you can't just translate word for word, .. we in dutch do not use the same grammar as English people and neither the same as Spanish or French for that matter ..
So either you get a crappy solution for a translation, .. where the other end is thinking wtf is this guy saying..
neither do we use the same expressions, ..
Unless they can make your iphone mind read I don't care what they claim it's impossible to make a good translation.