Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Research Uses Kinect To Translate Between Spoken and Sign Languages
An anonymous reader writes in with a neat project Microsoft is working on to translate sign language with a Kinect. "Microsoft Research is now using the Kinect to bridge the gap between folks who don't speak the same language, whether they can hear or not. The Kinect Sign Language Translator is a research prototype that can translate sign language into spoken language and vice versa. The best part? It does it all in real time."
We were doing real-time ASL translation to text using the webcam on the Indy2 workstation back in 1997, success rate was about 85% and most of the misses were from hidden object problems which the Kinect does nothing to help with.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
never underestimate what people can do
http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/15/stevie_wonder_thanks_steve_jobs_for_making_ios_devices_fully_accessible
It's a shame Obamacare doesn't address hearing aids and glasses, it would have likely gotten a lot more support.
That's funny. Not only is the deaf community a tiny minority (unlikely to have any impact at all), the issue of hearing aids is enough to divide them! If they found out you could get a cochlear implant with insurance purchased through an exchange, you'd see little other than opposition. (Yeah, they're that crazy.)
Not that they're likely to be aware of the issue, as illiteracy is so prevalent. Still, if they found out, they'd oppose it.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Disclaimer: yes I work for Microsoft. No not on these projects.
This was demo'd live in front of 30K MSFT employees at our annual company meeting. It nearly brought me to tears. Yes, I can see through demoware and and yes it's highly imperfect, but honestly it was the single most impressive use of technology I've ever seen. It was both novel and simple. It combined hardware, algorithms, user experience, and cloud scale. I don't know if it will ever go anywhere though I expect that it will. The key point here is that these are off the shelf components. Kinect and gesture APIs combined with machine translation and text to speech. It's important that these are, all or nearly all public production APIs. Such a system 10 years ago even if possible, would never make it to market because of the tiny user base. Today we can build such apps for the 0.01% of the population that need Mandarin Sign Language translated to English. And it can be cost effectively. That is the point. Technology being used to address real problems for under served communities. So yes, maybe people researched automated sign language recognition years ago, but bringing it to market and enabling a scenario for real people is a wholly different beast