Reblogged from http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-firm-talks-up-mankinds-recovery-from-the-tower-of-babel/
You speak
in your language but the listener hears you in his or hers — by phone,
via the Internet, or even face-to-face. It’s a linguistic revolution,
say the innovators behind Lexifone
April 9, 2013, 2:50 pm
7
“And the whole earth was of
one language, and of one speech… And they said, Come, let us build us a
city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven… And the Lord
came down to see the city and the tower… And the Lord said, Behold, the
people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to
do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have
imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their
language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
“So the Lord scattered them abroad from
thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the
city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did
there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the
Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”
(Genesis, Chapter 11, Verses 1-9)
The Bible ascribes the diversity of languages
on Earth — some 6,500 tongues in current usage, according to most
estimates — to the hubris of post-flood mankind in seeking to build a
tower to heaven, and a divine decision to punish that Tower of Babel
construction project by “confounding” man’s capacity to communicate in a
single tongue.
Now, an Israeli start-up claims to be perfecting the best means of overcoming that biblical curse of global language barriers.
“Our vision is to allow two people anywhere in
the world to communicate and understand each other, no matter their
language and no matter the medium
— phone, Internet, or face-to-face,” said Ike Sagie, the CEO of
Lexifone. “We believe that our product is the harbinger of this
revolution.”
A step toward conquering the Earth’s linguistic cacophony, Lexifone lets you speak to anyone in English
and (so far) seven other languages. The person on the other end (or
right next to you, using an Android app) hears what you’ve just said in
his or her own language. Right now, speakers of English, French,
Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Mandarin can call
each other and have their conversations automatically translated; on the
agenda are Japanese, Arabic, Korean, and Hebrew. More languages,
including other Chinese dialects, will follow, eventually covering most
global language requirements.
Using Lexifone “is like working with a
translator, but a lot cheaper,” said Itay Sagie, son of Ike Sagie and
the company’s head of marketing.
It’s at least 15 times cheaper, he posits, depending on the nature of
the live translation services a client would have used instead of
Lexifone.
“Our machine interacts with you, hearing what
you say and translating it for the listener. The system is extremely
accurate, with the machine engaging in a back and forth with the speaker
to ensure that it understood what was being said,” Itay told The Times
of Israel. The system can differentiate between dialects, such as
American, British and Australian English, and can take into account
regional accents, thanks to voice-to-machine software packages produced
by Nuance and other companies. The system is based on enhanced voice
recognition with a translation mechanism.
The capacity to “talk” to computers and be
understood by them has been around for years. What Lexifone brings to
the table is a unique translation system, called computational
linguistics, which can take the sentences spoken by users and quickly
turn them around into the same sentence translated into another
language. Lexifone strives not just for a literal translation, but a
cultural one, too. “We have a committee that evaluates phrases and
idioms in different languages and decides which ones are the best match
in each corresponding language,” said Itay.
Hundreds of companies large and small are
already using Lexifone to provide translation services for customers,
clients, or employees, he said. “Among our biggest customer segments are
expats who are living in countries where they are less familiar with
the language. They use our software to make phone calls to government
agencies, businesses, and the like.” The system works online, at the
Lexifone website, or via an Android app — which, Ike Sagie said, can
also be used for live, face-to-face translations via the Android
device’s microphone.
“We also have many small and medium-sized
businesses using it, getting translation services for a lot less than
they could with a live interpreter,” Ike added. “Right now we are
working on signing up large corporations and governments that have
expressed interest in our services.”
Many of those using Lexifone for translation
services also use it as an IP telephony app, similar to Skype, allowing
users to make calls via the Lexifone app to more than a hundred
countries at low rates, with the translation service built in.
Lexifone’s pride and joy is its accuracy, said
Itay. There are other tools on the market, he said, but they “will give
you gibberish for the most part. No one has as advanced a translation
system as we do.” Several other companies, notably NTT Docomo in Japan,
are making forays into the automatic translation market, “but their
system is much more limited, translating Japanese to and from only a few
languages. No one has taken translation as far as we have or has been
as successful and accurate as we have,” the younger Sagie said.
In a demonstration at a recent technology
industry event, Lexifone worked as advertised. A conversation with a
Mandarin speaker went surprisingly smoothly, from the exchange of
pleasantries (“hello, how are you, I am fine”) to a discussion of the
weather (“It’s raining here, what’s the weather over there?”) to a
relatively complicated sentence (“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”). Most of the translations were nearly
instantaneous, with a two-second computer beep differentiating between
the original sentence and the translation, which both participants in
the conversation heard. (The woodchuck line was a bit slower — about
three seconds.)
Lexifone is a relatively young company,
established in 2010 at the Hi-Center accelerator in Haifa, but its
products are already in use around the world. “We are working in
countries where there is a high language barrier, such as Russia, China,
and Latin America,” said Itay Sagie. Among the company’s marketing
efforts is developing programs for local governments in the US, said Ike
Sagie. “Many local and even state governments are doing business with
companies, suppliers, and officials in foreign countries, and especially
in the US many people do not have a foreign language. With Lexifone
they will have a much cheaper and easier way to communicate with
non-English speakers.”
Project/Wikipedia Commons)
Lexifone’s latest project is an R&D
facility to be built in China, which will work on expanding and
perfecting the system for Mandarin and other Chinese dialects. Under the
guidance of an Israeli-owned company called The PTL Group, which helps
local firms navigate the Chinese business environment, Lexifone recently
signed a memorandum of understanding with Changzhou, a city near
Shanghai where numerous Israeli companies have set up shop. “We will be
hiring Chinese staff and bringing in workers from Israel, and begin
working with Chinese companies that are looking to expand their exports,
but are stifled due to language challenges,” said Itay. “Working in
China will be a challenge, but no greater than the challenge we
successfully met in building our application.”
Growth has been going according to schedule,
said Ike, and the company aims ultimately to enable smooth communication
for anyone, anywhere. That’s quite a goal, given those 6,500 languages
— even though about 2,000 of them are said to be spoken by fewer than
1,000 people.
But Ike Sagie is undaunted. “The technology
behind Lexifone is very sophisticated,” he acknowledged, “but the user
interface is as simple as possible — all you have to do is talk.”
I read this last night. Interesting. One more step toward the NWO unification of mankind against the rule of Almighty God.
ReplyDeletePlease, understand that I am not saying this technology is evil . I am sure it will make communication much easier for everybody and bring people of different ethnic and language groups together and promote understanding. Every technological advance and application has a light and dark side. This dark side has been highlighted by the biblical quotation about the ancient tower of Babel in the above article.
In 1976, I was a graduate student at the University of California. As a teaching assistant, I was teaching French Literature. and linguistics, particularly phonetics, morphology, physiology of speech and its sound components to undergraduate students. My professor was a pioneer in speech recognition. He and his colleague professor as well as the research students were working on one the prototype of what was going to become the speech recognition software application.
We have come a long way Babel, it was 36 years ago.
So to the people that live in denial, pick up your phone, you don´t need a Babylon online translator or a live interpreter, willingly or unwittingly, you live in Babylon, you are part of Babel the second and last nightmarish experiment of rebellious mankind against Almighty God that will send you a delusion that you will not be able to resist.
It is still time to repent individually of your sins, ask for mercy and receive pardon and a new eternal life in Jesus-Christ because He, the Lord of Lords and King of Kings died in your place on the cross and was resurrected and now is alive.
Soon He will come to judge the world and do away with sin and evil which offend his holiness and all who rejected his offer of forgiveness and his free gift of eternal life.
The Word of God is very clear on that: Mercy triumphs over judgment. James 2:12 b but in Jonah 2:8 the scriptures also declare: those who cling to worthless idols forsake the grace that could be theirs. Maranatha. Lord Jesus, come.