Our company works in the area of voice recognition and natural language understanding quite a bit. It's important to realize that there are several different problems to solve here:
1. Voice Recognition: basically, taking human speech and turning it into words. This technology is readily available for speaker-independent applications (not like Dragon, which requires individual training). Microsoft Speech Server, and others, are very good at this, and in many languages. 2. Natural Language Understanding: voice recognition simply delivers words in text, without understanding. An entirely different technology is required to "understand" the sentence. This is a very difficult problem, still mostly relegated to academia. Microsoft English Query is a good example of applying sentence understanding to database models via a semantic overlay. 3. Language Translation: The goal of this particular discussion. Requires accurate voice recognition, strong natural language understanding (of at least two languages) and then translating between them accurately. As long as the domain of coverage is relatively small, then this should be fairly accurate, and getting better all the time. It's beyond everyone (except perhaps the NSA) to do this kind of work on a broad scale; it requires Google-infrastructure-sized horsepower, at this time, Moore's Law notwithstanding. Dave -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Arnold Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 12:31 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [NF] spoken language translator > > Excuse me, but there was a time just a few years ago that nobody > > believed a computer program could beat a chess expert/grandmaster - > > and then came Deep Blue. > > Compared to human language chess is child's play. When one > speaks several languages one quickly realizes how difficult > accurate translation really is. If i'm not mistaken in Arabic > tone height even changes the meaning of words... You're right. I had learned some basic Vietnamese, and still remember the word 'moo' which has 6 different meanings depending on how it's pronounced. Still and all, it can be done. Anything physically possible can be done. "the impossible will just take longer" :) Bill > A+ > jml [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
