Speech-to-Speech Translator iPhone App

[danrok]

Jjibbigo iPhone application turns phone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa

http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/m...phone-app.html

Comments?

[Daniel ~]

Looking at your Avatar...I'm guessing you had a rough year Dan? ":O}

(Wonder how that sounds in Spanish?)

[Gizmo]

I hope their speech recognition technology works better than what I've seen on most speech-to-text products, or they could be responsible for an international incident.....

[danrok]

Originally Posted by Daniel ~

Looking at your Avatar...I'm guessing you had a rough year Dan? ":O}

(Wonder how that sounds in Spanish?)

En cuanto a tu Avatar ... Supongo que tenía un año difícil, Dan.

[Áedán]

Originally Posted by Gizmo

I hope their speech recognition technology works better than what I've seen on most speech-to-text products, or they could be responsible for an international incident.....

It runs on the iPhone itself...

Apparently it handles simple things fairly well, but more complex stuff tends to trip it up. Sensibly, it includes a display of what it thinks you said!

[Daniel ~]

What does it think I said!? ":O}

[Daniel ~]

Originally Posted by danrok

En cuanto a tu Avatar ... Supongo que tenía un año difícil, Dan.

I like the sound of that!

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by Áedán

It runs on the iPhone itself...

Apparently it handles simple things fairly well, but more complex stuff tends to trip it up. Sensibly, it includes a display of what it thinks you said!

Yeah, I got the part about it running on the iPhone itself. However, it seems to me that it's got to include speech recognition technology in order to perform the translation; in effect it's two engines wired together: a speech-to-text engine (more likely a speech-to-token engine), and a text-to-speech engine. In between the two engines is a language translator.

Given the accuracy of the ASR engines I've worked with, and the accuracy of the text language translators I've seen, I'd be greatly surprised if it is terribly effective. Still, it's an impressive achivement, given what it has to work with (memory, cpu, etc.). I'm not saying that to be critical of the iPhone, merely observing that doing this in the constraints imposed by ANY mobile device is no mean feat.