DARPA builds a robot interpreter

DARPA is currently developing a robot interpreter that would support the troops at war. Right now, troops use human translators who speak in military radios. The Pentagon and DARPA seek to build a robot interpreter with 98% accuracy in 20 different languages. The project is called RATS for Robust Automatic Translation of Speech. Already during the war in Iraq, Darpa had provided English-Arabic translation gadgets. But today's versions are much more advanced and iPod-sized translators offer Arabic-English speech-to-speech translation with 70% accuracy. RATS will also be able to identify a most wanted person by analyzing his voice. Such a robot interpreter could be out in the public hands quicker than expected via Google which already understands multilingual translation, and with the help their Goog-411 speech recognition project. via wired