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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.'"

5 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Why 6,000 languages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    When everyone can just speak English?

  2. Great! by TimeElf1 · · Score: -1, Troll

    So, I can now get my Engrish in real time I'm so excited!

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  3. Android? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Where is the Android version?

    It only seems to have a download link for some download helper called "iTunes"...

    1. Re:Android? by MacDork · · Score: -1, Troll

      Where is the Android version?

      +1

  4. Bloody colonials by edittard · · Score: -1, Troll

    Ok, which kind of English would you pick? Canadian? Australian? Caribbean? Ghanaese? Indian? Scots?

    Proper English, the one that doesn't have any kind of qualifier, description or ($deity forbid) hyphenation bolted onto it.

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