Source: Alaska Dispatch
BANGKOK — Attention, forward-thinking American parents forcing your children to learn Chinese: a consortium of Asian governments is pouring cash and brainpower into technology that might render your kids’ budding language prowess useless. And they want to give it away, for free, to anyone with an mobile phone signal.
With little fanfare, a league of linguists hailing from almost every sizable Asian nation has released an iPhone application called “U-STAR.” Their goal: disseminating technology that can ingest speech in any widely spoken language and regurgitate a translation on the spot.
“That’s the idea of U-STAR,” said Chai Wutiwiwatchai, head of a language lab at Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency. “And it’s open source. Free of charge. No problems with intellectual property.”
The software is the culmination of seven years of research funded by more than 20 governments. Chai’s state-sponsored lab began building U-STAR with its Japanese counterpart, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, in 2006. Institutes from 24 countries, including European nations, have since signed on. (The US isn’t one of them.)
Read more: Alaska Dispatch
Filed under: Translation news
