‘Tower of Babel’ translator made
Scientists at The Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh are developing a rival to ‘Bable fish’, an online translator. Their invention will not be web based, but will translate spoken word. The days of Star Trek and the ‘Universal Translator’ may soon be upon us! The BBC have details, linked below and there is more details over on New Scientist.com
The translation systems that are currently in use work by using voice recognition software.
But this requires people to speak out loud and then wait for the translation to be read out, making conversations difficult.
But the new device, being created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, is different.
Electrodes are attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as the person silently mouths words and phrases.
Using this data, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words.
The system is then able to translate the words into another language which is read out by a synthetic voice…
The team currently has two prototypes: one that can translate Chinese into English and another that can translate English into Spanish or German.
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