IBM has developed a translation system that allows US soldiers to speak directly to Iraqis in their mother tongue !

The system has this lovely name: MASTOR. Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator. Returns.

Concretely, it's a software running on a laptop with two microphones. The user speaks in one microphone, the voice is translated by the algorithm that takes in account the pitch, the dialect, the feeling, ... Then it outputs the translation to the other guy.

MASTOR also creates a "textual account" of conversations. Previous speech-to-speech generation technology required the use of set phrases but MASTOR is able to process any speech and output the real meaning. Theorically. It knows 50,000 english words and 100,000 Iraqi Arabic words. There is also an English-Modern Arabic version and English-Mandarin Chinese. Ah, so, a future conflict under construction ?


"It's not a weapon", has the audacity to say Yuqing Gao, director at IBM Research, "the world has been divided and had so much conflict, and so much of that has been because of language barriers." Yeah.
The system is overall a response to the lack of linguists in the US army.


Source: InternetNews.com, last week.