Universal language system may solve translation problems

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Universal language system may solve translation problems

Published: 6 Jan 2013 at 21.24
Online news: Local News

SINGAPORE : Scientists are on the verge of shipping a universal speech translator with a system that speaks Thai and more than 20 other languages.

The heart of the U-Star system at the moment is usually a hand-held video camera like this, outfitted with a microphone (bottom) and the translation software.

The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) announced Sunday the system is in its final stage of development, and will be ready to ship well ahead of the planned Asean Economic Community in 2016.

U-Star, the name of the technology, currently translates 10 languages, either one-on-one or a conversation involving several different languages. They include Thai, English, Japanese, Mandarin, Malay, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, Hindi and Vietnamese.

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saharat
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Discussion 3 : 07 Jan 2013 at 03.103
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"Overall accuracy rate is between 60 and 90 percent".sounds like a winner to me.just dont venture outside of any tourist areas.and bring your batteries.
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tony_n
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Discussion 2 : 07 Jan 2013 at 02.082
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How can this be billed as a revolutionary system??

As far as I can see it is simply combining two existing technologies that perform notoriously badly: speech recognition and machine translation.

When we compound the errors of both, and consider that this appears to be proprietary software that doesn't leverage the huge amount of work already done in the development of, say, google translate, then we have something close to useless.

Even the best machine translation and speech recognition software is still pretty useless. I bet this will be worse.
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nitnoi
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Discussion 1 : 07 Jan 2013 at 00.441
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I heard that some movies translate english to Thai is ridiculous, even in face book from Thai to english by google is hilarious way way out of lines.Ahh! what a relieve! I don't think I can learn to speak english just to communicate with tourists in such a short time ,thank you U star.My grand father hurts or my eye hurts would end up the same translation, I can bet on that.
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Universal language system may solve translation problems | Bangkok Post: news