Slashdot Mirror
Gloves Translate Sign Language Into Auditory Speech
Zothecula writes about some pretty cool sensor gloves. From the article: "Since beginning in 2003, the Microsoft Imagine Cup has tasked students the world over with developing technology aimed at solving real-world problems. In this, its 10th year, students were asked to build their project around a specific Millennium Development Goal ... The winners have just been announced ... [and winning] first place (and US$25,000) in the Software Design category was the Ukraine's quadSquad with their EnableTalk gloves that translate sign language into speech in real time."
Until I see a gorilla using them to talk about a secret diamond mine, I'm unimpressed.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
After watching the video, it seems that what they've done is create gloves which recognize the various fingerspelling signs. If somebody wants to sign "I need to withdraw money" (like, at a bank), what this allows them to do is to make the sign for "I", then "N, E, E, D", then "T,O", and so forth. Then the gloves feed that output into a TTS system. This works (because ASL users and English speakers share a writing system), but is horribly inefficient, and would be equivalent to a translation module that makes you speak every letter of the written words individually before putting the words into Spanish.
This is fundamentally different from "translating sign language", where the gloves would recognize the (much more complex and spatially oriented) sign for "I", for "need", for "withdraw" and for "money", and then translate that into "I need to withdraw money" and speak it aloud. Adding in the fact that ASL syntax is fundamentally different than in English, it's quite a tall order. Interpreters need not fear.
This is cool, nobody's denying that, and for some jobs, this might be great, but at the moment, I don't see it working much faster than taking out the requisite smartphone and writing down what you're trying to get across.
With that kind of glove, deaf people could say "Talk to the hand, because the ear's not listening!"
I am officially gone from
The gloves translate dactylology (finger spelling). That's fairly easy, but it's horribly inefficient.
'Real' sign languages (like ASL) are much harder to translate because they are somewhat non-linear. A single gesture can describe several things at once: size, direction, emotional state, etc. There's no way you can translate it without fully understanding the context of the speech. And we all know how good computers are at such tasks...
Mod parent up! Finger Spelling is *not* Sign Language. If all this does is translate finger spelling into synthesized speech, the same thing could be done much faster and cheaper by just typing the words on a standard smartphone device.
This is not even cool. It is just, plain, wrong in so many ways. All of the money and hype spent making and marketing this device would reap 10X as much benefit if the same money were spent educating people about the real nature of deafness and sign language. The developers of this waste of time could start by taking a class about deafness themselves.
The fact that Slashdot perpetuates the inaccurate headline equating finger spelling with sign language just demonstrates how ignorant we all are.
So what would the translation be if you used the gloves to masturbate?
a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese