Joel Johnson: Military Voice Response Translator test-drive
Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson heads out into the mean streets of Brooklyn to test-drive a language translation gadget used by US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The voice response translator is produced by Integrated Wave Technologies, and is used in both combat and peacetime missions, with the ability to translate commonly used warnings, interrogation points, and commands into many different languages.
Joel, who describes himself as "an ignorant white doofus," says:
Some of the phrases were really quite violent, commanding people to get on the ground and put their hands over their heads. The guy who sits outside the five-and-dime all day on a folding chair thought those were especially funny.
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Man, I smoke a lot.
Yeah, that closing shot should serve as a warning to all the young people out there that smoking cigarettes is dangerous.
Training this device would drive anyone to smoke a lot.
It's not that bad, actually. I worked with the device for a report I did for NPR, and it was time-consuming to "train" the device the first time, but worked pretty well after that. It's about as good as voice response gets, I think. I would also wonder, though, about using anything like this in a combat situation. A live translator is always better, but as the people who make this explained, you cannot always get what you want in the military, and sometimes a device like this is the next best thing.
I like how you can speak into it passively and have the result come out yelling and screaming. This would come in handy when I want to yell at someone but I just don't want to expend the energy.
There's no way I could ever work for a company like IWT - I just wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to program the device to translate some random phrase as 'my hovercraft is full of eels'.
EELS! (mighty boosh reference)
Does it speak Jaradan?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPMAwSj0EsA
This was a great episode. Would be great to see more like this from Joel, please!
Is this Joels first tri-fecta (or any contributor for that matter)? BB, BBG, and BBTV?
this is also used by doctors to communicate with patients in many languages. Has different set of lines - more drop your drawers and bend over, less govt info stuff.
I don't like the tone it speaks spanish it's to harsh, i can't quite locate the accent either, it's not mexican or colombian or castillian.
Can you use it to order drinks and chat up women?
Guabaman, my hearing isn't first-rate and I was listening through wimpy little built-in laptop speakers, so I could easily be wrong; but what that first bunch of samples sounded like to me was midrange everybody-understands-it Sábado Gigante Spanish: less rhotic than Mexican Spanish, not lisping like Castilian, and without the dropped consonants you get in the Caribbean.
I'm afraid I don't speak Spanish, so the accent doesn't bother me. What I really need to know is does it have the words for, "Would you like a drink?" "How about we go somewhere a bit quieter?"
Will it do reverse translation? I want to know if the answer is "Yes I'll have a drink, why don't you come back to mine for it?" Or "There isn't enough booze in the whole world for me to be seen out with you gringo" :)
It's interesting that the military just doesn't train soldiers anymore to speak key phrases in a different language on their own without the use of a machine like that. And why would they need to know Italian? Last time I checked, Italy wasn't a problem country for the US military.
Maybe electronics companies have better lobbyists than than the language teachers.