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Print Edition StoriesMonday, March 23, 2009
BBN extends translation research with $2.8M from DARPA
By Mass High Tech Staff
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BBN Technologies Inc. of Cambridge has been awarded $2.8 million in additional funding under the federal Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) TRANSTAC program is aimed at developing two-way translation systems that enable speakers of different languages to communicate with one another spontaneously in real-world, tactical situations.
With the new funding, BBN will extend the current TRANSTAC system to serve more users in varied domains and geographic locations. BBN will focus on improvements in machine translation, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and the system architecture. A BBN official said that breaking the language barrier to spoken communications can “save lives in difficult environments.” In earlier work on the TRANSTAC project, BBN incorporated automatic speech recognition and machine translation capabilities into a portable, two-way translation device, called BBN TransTalk, that runs on standard laptop, tablet or notebook computers, the company said.
In other U.S. Department of Defense deals this year, BBN was awarded a $1.2 million contract from the U.S. Army for systems designed to monitor foreign broadcast media, and DARPA gave BBN a $1.4 million contract to continue research into gunshot detection systems.
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