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Azerbaijan shows off home-grown phone talk translation application

05 October 2009 15:43 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Aynur Veliyeva - APA-ECONOMICS. Azerbaijan has unveiled a home-grown cell-phone translator which automatically performs speech-to-speech translation when you talk to a foreigner over telephone.

The cell-phone application displayed at ITU Telecom World-2009 in Geneva (Switzerland) supports two languages with English-Azeri and Azeri-English options.

The software application dubbed as Dilmanc which means a translator in Azeri is not available for public yet because the project is under development.

This is based on Dilmanc machine translation software which has Azeri-English, English-Azeri and Turkish-Azeri options.

According to experts, speech recognition is a difficult problem, largely because of the many sources of variability associated with the signal. First, the acoustic realizations of phonemes, the smallest sound units of which words are composed, are highly dependent on the context in which they appear.

Second, acoustic variabilities can result from changes in the environment as well as in the position and characteristics of the transducer. Third, within-speaker variabilities can result from changes in the speakerâ€™s physical and emotional state, speaking rate, or voice quality. Finally, differences in sociolinguistic background, dialect, and vocal tract size and shape can contribute to across-speaker variabilities.

Word level variability can be handled by allowing alternate pronunciations of words in representations known as pronunciation networks. Common alternate pronunciations of words, as well as effects of dialect and accent are handled by allowing search algorithms to find alternate paths of phonemes through these networks.
Besides, grammatically complex side of the Azerbaijani language makes it difficult for the development of speech recognition system because of multiple affixation.