GadgetReview

Remember how we just finished talking about the Tele Scouter, which interprets every language and translates automatically?  Well, it’s a bit of a misnomer because there’s one language it won’t interpret–American Sign Language.

That’s right, folks–Ameslan is completely out of the Tele Scouter’s bailiwick.  But now, we may have the answer for that one–the Sign Language Interpreter.

Basically, what this is is a camera connected to a microprocessor that “sees” the motions of sign language, matches them against its own internal systems, translates them, and announces the word or letter that the gesture is the equivalent of.  I’m doing a bit of interpolation there as the read link wasn’t exactly clear on if it can handle words and letters or only letters, but either way, a sign language interpreter gadget will change the lives of deaf people everywhere.

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Oh Japan…have I told you lately that I love you?

You’ve given me some of the coolest, strangest, and most downright preposterous topics to write about of all time.  And today, you’ve given me a topic that’s ALL THREE.  You’ve given me a topic that proves conclusively that you’re going insane and yet you’re also brilliant.

You’ve given me the Tele Scouter, a headset-mounted translation device.

Yes, it’s actually called the Scouter.  For those of you now about to quote Dragon Ball Z, indeed, his power level is over nine thousand.

Anyway, the Tele Scouter uses an imaging device to project images directly onto your retina, and the images in question are fields of text, generated by voice recognition and translation programs that literally show you what someone else is saying, in your language, before your very eyes.

And it’s not just translation, either–there’s talk these can be used in sales pitches to get instant access to customers’ shopping records via face recognition technology.  Now, I don’t know what the long term ramifications are of getting all that light shined directly onto your retina, but the thought of an instant translator IS pretty cool.  The price is pretty salty, as you might expect–about eighty three thousand dollars for a set of thirty, plus the cost of any custom software to go with it.

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So I was digging around when I found DARPArama, kind of a clearinghouse of prototypes and ideas and whatnot out of DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

And I started reading about the Phraselator…and frankly, you’re not going to believe this.

The Phraselator is a voice recognition based translator device.  Basically, you speak it at the Phraselator and it tells you the equivalent of what you want to say in another language, much like the Universal Translator devices of Star Trek fame.  The Phraselator starts out with an onboard six languages, but this is only a starting point as the Phraselator can be taught many more.  In fact, the Los Angeles Police Department, which bought several of them, taught their Phraselators a whopping 224 languages.

It may well be only a matter of time before we can slip on a Bluetooth-style headset, go anywhere in the world, and be absolutely certain we speak the native language no matter what language we actually speak.

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If you love surfing the websites of foreign countries but find it too much of a hassle to learn to speak their language first, then you’ll love what Google’s about to do for you.  They’ve issued free software that allows website operators to automatically translate online pages into any of 51 languages.

It’s called the “translator gadget”, and it will automatically shift the language on the page to match the default browser’s language.  Let’s say that I’m a guy from somewhere near Iran, and my browser’s set to Farsi.  I surf on over to Craigslist to look for a job writing for a fashion magazine, and they’ve got the gadget installed, and boom!  Suddenly Craigslist is coming to me live in Farsi.

Granted, the system isn’t foolproof.  As everyone who’s surfed Engrish.com knows, translation isn’t always an exact science, especially for software.  But still, those occasional errors should at least be entertaining!

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