Cool Startrek-like translator

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6083994.stm

Seems you have to say the word silently (mouthing it) and it will say it in the foreign language, blimey!

well... it isn't -really- startrek like, because the universal translator is able to translate unknown languages based on probabilties and the vast amount of other languages and rules within them.

The star trek thing is pretty much pure fantasy, while this will only ever be able to translate what is already inside it. And won't be able to translate what the other people around you are saying so you can hear it... they would need them too. Where in startrek, the universal translators translate what you say to match what they say....

Something, which they liked to break... They would forget about the universal translators and have klingons sometimes speak in klingon with the humans around them not understanding them.

haahah.. Dork Power!

yeah I was always a bit confused as to how the universal translater actually worked because if you spoke and it spoke too they alien would hear two voices unless it used "star trek magic science" to cancel out your voice's sound waves. Also does it use your inflection/emotion etc in the translated version so aliens can see when you are peed off or smooching (think Riker and Kirk) ;-)

In the original Star Trek the universal translator was a stick like thing that was only used a couple of times, along with anytime they were talking to someone on the main viewscreen of the bridge I guess. The Gorn, if I remember correctly, made a nice hissing sound that was translated to english.

Star Trek VI had a nice effect in the trial when the one Klingon switched from Vulcan to English. (Same general thing in "The Hunt for Red October" too) Well I can see I'm rambling.

In one episode of deep space nine, quark his brother and nephew got transported into the past (where they were the aliens that crashed in roswell) and they had to repair their universal translators to understand basic english... They were chips inside their heads, basicly.

I remember that episode. :)

StarTrek can soooo happen.

Very cool technology, still seems a few years off, if not more.

Nice idea, but somehow I doubt this will be very reliable in practice. Anyone remember this one?

"Dear Aunt let's set so double the killer delete select all"

Demo of MS voice recognition technology gone awry:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1123221217782777472

Somehow, reliable voice recognition seems to be perpetually just 5 years in the future. Believing the hype back in the early 90's, everyone would have thrown their keyboards out years ago by now.

But all of that aside: Even with the existing 'odd' translations of Babelfish and the likes, the the existence of dozens of voice recognition programs already present on the PC, this bit of the original article seems *horribly* underimpressive:

If the prototypes used a small vocabulary of about 100-200 words they worked with about 80% accuracy, researcher Tanja Schultz said. But, she added, a full vocabulary had a much lower level of accuracy.


200 words? 80% accurate? That's so underimpressive considering what your average PC has been capable of for the past DECADE, that I'm amazed anyone is taking this seriously at all.

yeah it's crap haha.

Hmm... I remember some voice recognition programs running on Apple II and they were better than what MS was showing. Looks like some types of software are actually "improving" in a somewhat backwards fashion. :)