Gloves Translate Sign Language Into Auditory Speech 78
Zothecula writes about some pretty cool sensor gloves. From the article: "Since beginning in 2003, the Microsoft Imagine Cup has tasked students the world over with developing technology aimed at solving real-world problems. In this, its 10th year, students were asked to build their project around a specific Millennium Development Goal ... The winners have just been announced ... [and winning] first place (and US$25,000) in the Software Design category was the Ukraine's quadSquad with their EnableTalk gloves that translate sign language into speech in real time."
Re:Not going to work (Score:5, Interesting)
Also ASL does not have articles, so it does not translate directly to english. It is really a visual spatial language, people always seem to miss that.
Re:No, it translates fingerspelling into speech (Score:3, Interesting)
After watching the video, it seems that what they've done is create gloves which recognize the various fingerspelling signs. If somebody wants to sign "I need to withdraw money" (like, at a bank), what this allows them to do is to make the sign for "I", then "N, E, E, D", then "T,O", and so forth. Then the gloves feed that output into a TTS system. This works (because ASL users and English speakers share a writing system), but is horribly inefficient, and would be equivalent to a translation module that makes you speak every letter of the written words individually before putting the words into Spanish.
This is fundamentally different from "translating sign language", where the gloves would recognize the (much more complex and spatially oriented) sign for "I", for "need", for "withdraw" and for "money", and then translate that into "I need to withdraw money" and speak it aloud. Adding in the fact that ASL syntax is fundamentally different than in English, it's quite a tall order. Interpreters need not fear.
This is cool, nobody's denying that, and for some jobs, this might be great, but at the moment, I don't see it working much faster than taking out the requisite smartphone and writing down what you're trying to get across.
I work with a deaf person, and believe me, they can sign incredibly fast. I reckon that he could say something simple "do you want to get lunch" fast enough with finger spelling that it'd sound completely normal speed to me. Sure, adding memory for all the words for various languages would be neat (very hard though), but for now, it's quite useful. Keep in mind that they don't always carry paper/phones with them, so sometimes the only option is to sign.