Computer translation

Three years of work by a large interdisciplinary team at the University of Southern California has created a rudimentary but working two-way voice translation system that allows an English-speaking doctor to talk to a Persian-speaking patient.

The Transonics Spoken Dialog Translator turns a doctor's spoken English questions into spoken Persian, and translates patients' spoken Persian replies into spoken English.

"Fluent two-way machine voice translation is one of the holy grails of engineering," said Shrikanth Narayanan, an associate professor of electrical engineering, computer science and linguistics at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering who directs the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) in the Viterbi School's Integrated Media Systems Center.

"We are years away from perfecting it, but we hope to have something that will be useful in emergency rooms or ambulances within two years or so."

The Transonics system runs on a laptop computer using the Linux operating system. Doctor and patient both wear headphones with attached microphones. A small keypad connected to the computer speeds and simplifies certain routine commands — switching from doctor mode to patient mode, for example.