Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Raytheon BBN's translation system attract $5.5M Army deal

By Michelle Lang

Raytheon BBN Technologies, a Cambridge subsidiary of Waltham-based Raytheon Co., landed a $5.5 million deal with the U.S. Army to build a two-way communication and translation system intended for mobile devices.
 
The system is expected to support communication with non-English speaking people through verbal speech-to-speech translation, as well as text-to-text and document translation, the company said in a news release.

Raytheon BBN is responsible initially for the software architecture development for systems’ use in portable, mobile and net-enabled devices.

“There simply are not enough human translators available to meet the Army’s needs, and previous translation devices have restricted users to a selection of canned phrases,” Prem Natarajan, Raytheon BBN’s head of the speech, language and multimedia processing unit, said in a statement.

In November, Raytheon BBN scored a $10.5 million multi-year Air Force Laboratory contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) for its Sirius program, which focuses on game development to create better training systems.

The company became a Raytheon subsidiary in 2009, after the defense giant bought BBN for $350 million. BBN, which was founded in 1948, is known historically for, among other innovations, the military Arpanet system that was a precursor to the Internet. Its employees have gone on to found at least 100 new startups.