27-08-2008, 10:11 AM
A new gadget in development in Japan will translate your speech commands – "A full English breakfast, followed by a Snackpot, with a can of Fanta" – into foreign languages.
Well, it's not that simple. It translates your voice into text, then converts the text from one language into another and then translates the new text into whatever language you're struggling with. Since it combines voice recognition with language translation, there's a huge amount of work to do.
But according to Nikkei.net, it may not be long before the technology is ready. The Japanese government's Council for Science and Technology Policy has a five year roadmap (if I've translated it properly), meaning conversations in multiple languages could soon be possible.
The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) predicts fully automated speech translators will be available by 2015. So they may arrive before the burger and chips I ordered ages ago.
At the core is a proprietary speech-recognition technology developed by NEC.
http://tinyurl.com/6epupa
Fuente: http://www.inttranews.net
