Travelers could soon be able to translate conversations with foreigners in an instant through laptops with microphones and software that functions pretty much like human interpreters, that is if IBM has its way.

Big Blue showed off its latest is speech technology and related plans on Tuesday, with demonstrations of applications that improve convenience for drivers, translations for the military and others interacting with foreigners in the real world, and Web translations for news readers. The company cheerfully announced it has cleared several hurdles that have been hampering development of speech technology including background noise, regional dialects, and accents.

The technologies also add emotional cues to automated voice response systems and interpret different dialects and phrasing, while allowing many realistic command and response scenarios for mobile voice technologies. Most work in several languages, with Arabic, English, Mandarin and English being the most popular among IBM’s applications because of business potential and government demands.

Source: InformationWeek