A new iPhone 3GS app that turns the mobile device into an English-Spanish/Spanish-English speech translator is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Alex Waibel. The application is being sold via Jibbigo, a company launched by Waibel.
CMU says the app has a vocabulary of about 40,000 words and is ideal for world travelers and medical doctors. Speak a couple of sentences intothe phone and it spits back an audible translation.
The software runs on the iPhone, so Web connectivity is not required to use it. It is not designed to translate phone conversations.
Not to give CMU all the credit here, Jibbigo credits "two decades of the most advanced scientific research in speech and language processing at Mobile Technologies."
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Real time Translation.
This is the first stand alone app I have heard of. Others are available with the Blackberry for example, using a Google web app. Some also have the Speech to text added; in other cases you need to have Dragon Naturally speaking also running. There has also been recent adaptation of chat bots, or conversational agents; to be real time translators. Several examples can be found at the "Second Life" virtual world.
It is still an impressive accomplishment to get all the algorithms running on the limited resources of a smart phone.
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