Programme details

At home or abroad, language is our passport to communication. But what about computers - will they ever talk to us naturally, and help us cross the language barrier? There are situations like doing two things at once, driving a car, or cooking dinner - your hands are busy, your eyes are busy, and you want to be talking to the system at the same time. But the sheer variety of human language and expression poses a major challenge for computers. A research team at The University of Edinburgh took the example of a tourist information system as they search for a solution.
Computers could also help people overcome language barriers when they travel. At IBM in Prague Jan Kleindienst is taking part in a project to develop near real time speech to speech translation.
Nevertheless speech recognition technology has been under development for 50 years, and it could take many more before the almost human computers of science fiction films become a reality.