Tower of Babel Translator
- October 26th, 2006
- Read 1688 times
- 2 Comments
The Tower of Babel translator is a prototype translation device that functions in a completely different fashion from existing translators. Rather than having users punch in words on a keypad and then get back a computery sounding voice, the Tower of Babel works by hooking electrodes to the users face. The electrode are able to monitor facial expressions and then issue translations when it recognizes the motion for a particular word.
So far it can translate Chinese to English and English to Spanish or German. It currently only has a vocabulary of about 200 words, but its accuracy with those words is said to be 80 percent. Perhaps one day this technology will be on par with the Babel Fish. Probably not though.
‘Tower of Babel’ Translator Made [BBC News via Gizmodo]
Jason Kolb (Who am I?)
1 year ago
I wonder how fast this works. I always thought it would be cool to hook up a translator like Google’s to an IP phone with speech recognition to get on-the-fly two-way translating, but I think the lag would be too great. The problem is that the translater needs the complete word before it can translate it, it can’t translate as it’s being spoken which results in a very choppy conversation.