Language barriers - particularly those between Thai and English speakers - may soon cease to be a major problem in Thailand, following the development of automatic speech translation technology by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec).

The director of Nectec's Human Language Technology Laboratory, Chai Wutiwiwatchai, said a Speech Translation Project at the centre had set out to solve the problem of poor English skills in the Thai workforce. Services developed by the project will now allow speech-to-speech translation of Thai to English or English to  Thai via the Internet.

"We started the project to support the tourism industry, since translation will help people to communicate better and create understanding between Thais and foreigners. The tourism industry has an important role because it can generate revenue from international tourism of around US$10 billion (Bt340.54 billion) a year," Chai said.

Since it began in 2007, the project has successfully developed Thai-English translation for tourism operators. The technology can be either network-based, or a standalone application. At the same time, the project has developed technologies related to automatic speech recognition (ASR), statistical machine translation (SMT), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) and speech-to-speech translation (S2S).

Chai said the project's next step would be developing technologies to support communication at international conferences and business negotiations.

source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com