Metaglossia: The Translation World

Voice-recognition technology has made significant progress of late, becoming a popular feature of smartphones, automotive navigation and entertainment systems. While a panel of Silicon Valley tech experts says it still has its glitches, it can eventually improve to where talking to a machine is like talking to a person.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — If speech-recognition technology were a human, it would be like a 5- or 6-year-old child. At the age of 1, you can speak to a child, but you have to speak slowly and simply using small words. By 5 or 6, it starts to better understand your words and, more importantly, your meaning.

The comparison of computer speech development to human speech development came up during a panel discussion Aug. 20 at a forum hosted by the Churchill Club of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, Calif. Representatives of a speech-recognition software company, an automaker and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak discussed where speech recognition has been and where it’s going.

Speech is becoming the new computer user interface, said Quentin Hardy, deputy technology editor of The New York Times and moderator of the panel, continuing a long line of UI evolution from the punch card and the command line interface to the mouse and the touch-screen.

With each advance, the interaction shifts became less machine and more human. When we want to get someone’s attention, we tap them on the shoulder like we tap on a screen, said Wozniak, and when we want to talk to someone, we speak.

If computers are rendered capable of recognising speech it will one day be the norm to give commands by voice rather than via a keyboard. “Speaking” with a mobile phone is already commonplace for many people.

Adoro falar con xente na súa propia lingua.
You probably don’t understand that, but Google does. Google Voice just added 13 new languages, including Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Portuguese to bring its total linguistic competency to 42 languages and dialects.
Meanwhile, Siri knows English, French, German, and Japanese, although Apple will be adding another 11 when iOS 6 hits in the fall.
Adding languages is not easy, but it’s a task that is custom-built for big data, and Google has big data in its back pocket. Before a language comes onstream, the company needs a minimum of hundreds of thousands of phrases, which the company can then parse as its servers learn to translate.
For some languages it’s easier than others: Google says that while Romanian follows predictable pronunciation rules, Swedish does not. (Perhaps that’s why there are so many good Romanian hackers?)
The full list of new languages also includes Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Hungarian, Icelandic, Serbian, Slovak, and Galician.
(No, I’d never heard of Galician before either. Wikipedia says it’s the language that is spoken in Galicia, which makes sense, and that Galicia is an autonomous region of northwestern Spain. Another day, another lesson.)

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/17/google-voice-adds-13-languages-for-a-total-of-42-siri-still-at-4/#muMMxssPTFTWDcwL.99

C'est la machine qui vous parle
La reconnaissance vocale, c'est quand la machine comprend ce que vous lui dites. Du genre, « voulez-vous contacter votre conseiller bancaire ? », vous répondez « oui », et c'est parti... La synthèse vocale, c'est l'inverse : la machine vous parle d'une voix aussi vraie que nature, comme sur les serveurs vocaux de la SNCF ou les bornes RER. À France Télécom Lannion, un groupe travaille sur cette technique depuis une vingtaine d'années autour de Thierry Moudenc, pointure mondiale dans le domaine.

Giving the Web a Voice – text to speech specialist CereProc opens its CereVoice Cloud software-as-a-service to the public
18 Jun 2012
Speech synthesis technology company CereProc has launched its powerful text-to-speech (TTS) CereVoice Cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) into public beta, providing developers needing speech output, fast and easy access to the advanced CereVoice TTS engine on any platform.

CereProc’s cloud based service enables application developers to integrate speech into their applications without having to install a TTS engine, keeping implementation costs and integration time to a minimum for a quality TTS system.

CereProc’s objective with this service is to increase accessibility to state-of-the-art text to speech (TTS) software via SOAP and REST web service APIs. The CereVoice Cloud service is compatible with platforms that do not allow native development - such as Windows Phone 7 - in addition to providing low-powered internet-connected devices that lack the capability of running a powerful text to speech (TTS) engine with the opportunity of integrating text to speech (TTS) output.

Check out speechtrans.com or find us on the Apple App store for the best Bi-Directional Speech To Speech Translator with Voice Recognition done by Nuance. Currently available in English to French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Download it today from the App Store!

AT&T has been involved in the speech recognition space for years. And now, the company wants to share with others what it's achieved.
The company announced today that it will make several AT&T Watson Speech application programming interfaces (APIs) available to developers in June. With the help of those APIs, developers will be able to create new apps and services that rely upon AT&T's Watson speech recognition technology.
The first set of APIs that AT&T plans to release will focus on Web search, question-and-answer, SMS, and dictation, among other areas, the company said. In addition, it will offer up a software development kit (SDK) for those developers who want to "capture a user's spoken words and send them into the network for transcription." AT&T says that the SDK should make it easy to integrate Watson into existing apps.

AT&T's research arm has spent over two decades developing its Watson speech and language engine, which translates spoken words into text. Now, AT&T is planning to release a number of Watson APIs for developers in June, in an effort to accelerate development and innovation in the voice recognition space. Instead of having to develop their own speech recognition software, developers will now be able to plug AT&T's Watson APIs into their apps to more easily include voice recognition features.