Computerized polyglots to serve foreigners during Beijing Olympics

Computerised polyglots will be used during next years Beijing Olympic Games to help foreigners get around.

New Delhi, Sept.12 : Computerised polyglots will be used during next year's Beijing Olympic Games to help foreigners get around.

For example, if a foreign visitor wants to taste Chinese food, he may use his roaming cell phone to dial a number and speak his inquiry. Seconds later, he will get ample information in English from a computerized polyglot.

Pan Jielin, who works on employing speech recognition technologies in Olympics-related service, told Xinhua that Beijing would be the first city in the world to extensively offer a multi-lingual computerized information service.

Beijing will host at least 550,000 foreign and 2.2 million domestic visitors during the Olympic games.

"We now only have Chinese and English services, but will expand to other languages, including French, German and Spanish," said Pan, an associate director of Thinkit Speech Laboratory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Acoustics.

Pan's lab has developed the embedded multi-lingual speech recognition engine, which picks up acoustic features of human speech, coverts sound signals to bytes, compares discourses of speakers with various syllables in different languages, and optimises match-ups from algorithmic processing.

In a matter of seconds, speakers could get a response from the system.

"We are very competitive in processing the Chinese language because we're able to get excellent Chinese databases, including those of dialects," said Zhao Qingwei, the lab's chief technology officer.

"We're quite confident of recognizing more than 90 percent of speeches of certain topics, such as road and traffic information, Olympic competition results, Olympic venues information, and weather information," Pan said.

Pan's team is focusing on improving the recognition rate of spoken languages and reducing noise affects.

China Mobile, the country's largest monopoly over mobile telecommunication, has already employed the recognition technology in its new valued-added service, Coloring Ring Back Tone.

Subscribers could easily find popular melodies, even if they don't know their titles, by just humming a few segments.

The speech and melody recognition technology is also welcomed by entertainment places such as Karaoke arcades.

ANI