EU project develops speech translation system for tourist domain
The European Commission's IST programme is funding a project which will enable multilingual and multimodal communication using speech to speech translation on tourist information. NESPOLE! (negotiating through spoken language in e-commerce) is a system whereby someone with a personal computer and Internet connection can make a telephone call, for example to Italy, and find out tourist information in English, German or French even though the telephone operator only speaks Italian. The customer will also be able to see multimedia data, such as web pages and maps on their computer, whilst talking to the operator, and a tablet and pen device will allow both parties to select or point to objects on maps. Summarising the project, John McDonough from Karlsruhe University in Germany, one of the project partners told CORDIS News: 'The idea is that after looking at some web pages, the client will call up and speak with an Italian operator and ask for some more information about a few things. The client will speak in their own language and the operator in Italian, and between the two, the system will translate from one language to the other.' The system is based on interchange formats. 'Once we have an utterance that's been recognised, we take the words that have been recognised and construct the semantic concepts contained therein,' explains Dr McDonough. 'We represent these concepts in this interchange format. Once the concepts have been repeated in the interchange format, we have another module that can synthesise speech and the target language based on the interchange format.' NESPOLE! began in January 2000, and is due to finish in June 2002. Five partners from Italy, France and Germany are working on the project, which has a total budget of 2.75 million euro, 1.68 million of which was provided by the European Commission.