London, Mar 14 (ANI): An American multinational corporation has brought Star Trek's universal translator closer to reality by developing a software that turns spoken English into 26 different languages and which 'speaks' in the user's own voice.
It has long been used by James T Kirk to speak to aliens and blue women from space but now Microsoft is on the brink of making a real, working Universal Translator that can translate into languages from Spanish to Mandarin.
The researchers including Frank Soong and Rick Rashid hope that the device will one day allow visitors to foreign countries to have conversations with other people, even though they do not speak the same language - just like in Star Trek.
Soong told Technology Review that his breakthrough could help language students and might also work with navigational devices.
In theory it could one day be installed into a smart phone meaning tourists have a ready made translation device sitting in their pockets.
"We will be able to do quite a few scenario applications," the Daily Mail quoted Soong as saying.
"For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we'll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output in a different language, but still in his own voice."
Soong and Rashid work at Microsoft's HQ in Redmond, Washington and they created the system with colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, the company's second-largest research lab.
In Star Trek it was apparently introduced in the late 22nd century and helped the crew of the Enterprise communicate with aliens as they explored the universe.
However, Soong and Rashid have now made their version, even if the voice, which comes out in the foreign language, still sounds a little mechanical.
Their device requires around one hour to get used to a person's voice then works by comparing the words that have been recorded with stock models for the target language.
The technology has been designed so that it does not only translate words, which would give it a computerised and disjointed sound.
Instead the sounds are cautiously manipulated to mimic real speech as realistically as possible. (ANI)
|
|
Read More: Mobile Technology | Technology Bhawan | U.g.c.works | L.w.works(guntur) | K.c.works | Agricultural Research Centre | Central Leather Research Insti | Indian Institute Of Technology | James Town Edso | Govt.college Of Technology | Indian Research Po | Kharagpur Technology So | Haringhat River Research Insti | Bikaram English | Rajapur English | Bihta English | Prasadi English | Mangalhat English | Dhanaw English | English
Comments:
