Scientists Develop Tower of Babel Device
Posted on October 25, 2006
The BBC reports that scientists have developed a device that translates silently mouthed words into another language.
Users simply have to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another.The BBC says the scientists are working on a Chinese into English version and an English to Spanish or German version. They hope that eventually the device will let you mouth words into the device in English and it will speak them in Chinese, Spanish or German. The ultimate goal would be a device that could translate any language. The New Scientist article calls the device the "closest thing to the babel fish." The article says the device still has trouble with sequence of words it has never heard before.The researchers said the effect was like watching a television programme that had been dubbed.
The system, detailed in New Scientist, is not yet fully accurate, but experts said it showed the technology was "within reach".
The translation systems that are currently in use work by using voice recognition software.
The researchers use software that has been taught to recognise which phonemes are most likely to appear next to each other and in what order. When it encounters a string of phonemes it is unfamiliar with or has only partially heard, it uses this knowledge to come up with a range of sequences that make sense given the surrounding phonemes and words, assigns a probability to each one, and then picks the one with the highest probability.The universal translator is not far away.The system still has some way to go. Faced with a sequence of words it has never heard before, it picks the right phoneme sequence only 62 per cent of the time. This nevertheless ranks as "a very significant achievement" according to Chuck Jorgensen, who is working on using sub-vocal speech recognition to control robots at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "This is showing that the technology is really within reach."