Thursday, March 21, 2002
Urdu made easy
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 11:02 AM
http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO69307,00.html
The universal translator of Star Trek lore just got one step closer today!
"As Patterson, vice president and chief financial officer at Marine Acoustics Ltd, pushed buttons on what the company calls a Phraselator, the device spit out commands such as "show me your identification" in one after the other of the four predominant languages in Afghanistan, Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Urdu. Then he spoke phrases in English into the device, with translations occurring in a matter of seconds. It was the end result of a crash project Marine Acoustics conducted to take the Phraselator from concept to reality in just six months.
...Marine Acoustics, which is run by retired officers and Naval Academy graduates including Patterson, developed the Phraselator on a handheld computer powered by the Windows CE operating system using voice recognition software from SRI International in Palo Alto, Calif.
...The translator packs a lot of power and information into a tiny device. It can store 1,000 phrases in the four languages on a 20MB compact flash card, and other languages can be supported by other cards. The Afghan unit comes equipped with what Patterson described as a "force protection" language module used by troops operating under potentially hostile conditions. The device also can be quickly adapted to other circumstances with the addition of other modules. For example, a medical module would contain phrases that would help doctors or medics treat patients, he said." Source: Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz
The universal translator of Star Trek lore just got one step closer today!
"As Patterson, vice president and chief financial officer at Marine Acoustics Ltd, pushed buttons on what the company calls a Phraselator, the device spit out commands such as "show me your identification" in one after the other of the four predominant languages in Afghanistan, Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Urdu. Then he spoke phrases in English into the device, with translations occurring in a matter of seconds. It was the end result of a crash project Marine Acoustics conducted to take the Phraselator from concept to reality in just six months.
...Marine Acoustics, which is run by retired officers and Naval Academy graduates including Patterson, developed the Phraselator on a handheld computer powered by the Windows CE operating system using voice recognition software from SRI International in Palo Alto, Calif.
...The translator packs a lot of power and information into a tiny device. It can store 1,000 phrases in the four languages on a 20MB compact flash card, and other languages can be supported by other cards. The Afghan unit comes equipped with what Patterson described as a "force protection" language module used by troops operating under potentially hostile conditions. The device also can be quickly adapted to other circumstances with the addition of other modules. For example, a medical module would contain phrases that would help doctors or medics treat patients, he said." Source: Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz
