In Chapter Four I mentioned IBM Research work on InfoScope, a device that could translate a sign via camera-PDA-shape-recogniton-machine-translation. Wired News reports on similar work at Carnegie-Mellon’s Robotics Institute.
Here’s how it works: The baffled tourist takes a digital photo of the sign with a camera built into his PDA, and the sign translator software detects the text within the image. In a matter of seconds, the text is translated into English.
The current version of the Sign Translator is fluent in Chinese. It can translate more than 3,700 Chinese characters into English.
Comments
@ 12:32
Hey, Howard, any chance you can talk Perseus into making your book available via Audible (http://www.audible.com/)? I really want to read it, but this is the only “reading” I do anymore.
@ 16:47
Contact Perseus, Jenny! I’d love to make the book available in whatever form people want to receive it.