Speech-to-speech translation has long captured the imagination of just about everyone. What was once science fiction is now reality thanks to IBM and other companies. I wrote a blog post about this last month entitled: For smartphone makers, speech-to-speech translation is key to success. I cited an interesting page on IBM’s website in that post which you can read here. This page introduces a real-time, mobile solution for speech-to-speech translation on cellphones which uses Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Watch the IBM video to learn more about this system.
What I found most interesting about this system is that it requires no Internet connection. Using robust bilingual dictionaries, it can be used anywhere. So any mobile device or cellphone can be used as a personal interpretation device. Pretty neat! Right now, there are dictionaries for English-Arabic and English-Chinese.
I had the opportunity to correspond with the head of the IBM Research team that is developing this amazing technology, Dr. Bowen Zhou. Among his other tasks at IBM, Dr. Zhou is Principal Investigator in the DARPA TransTac speech-to-speech translation project. With roots in military applications, this technology is going to become commercial soon. The day is not far when we will be able to download this app to our iPhone, Android or other smartphone. Will IBM sell this app directly? Will it license the technology to a third-party (like Apple)? When will this product be released? IBM is keeping its cards close to the chest as you can see from Dr. Zhou’s comments:
Was the product already deployed? If so, who is using it?
Dr. Zhou: This is not officially an IBM product yet, but we did offer the software to some of our clients.
Is the app available commercially and if not, will it be available commercially in the near future? On what mobile phones will it be available?
Dr. Zhou: The app is not currently commercially available to the public. The app is available to some of our clients on Android. iOS devices are possible too. We don’t comment on future plans but will be glad to discuss more.
Now the product supports the language pairs English-Chinese and English-Arabic. Is it only these pairs or are there other languages? Will there be other language pairs supported in the near future?
Dr. Zhou: We also have some limited support of other language pairs (including the ones under development). Again, will be glad to discuss more if you have specific interest.
Related articles
- iPhone text-to-speech, speech-to-text patents filed (news.cnet.com)
- Microsoft demos speech-to-speech translator (GTS Blog)
- Will IBM power speech-to-speech translation on iPhone? (GTS Blog)
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