New Tower of Babel.....

Israeli firm talks up mankind’s 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 LexifoneBy DAVID SHAMAH April 9, 2013, 2:50 pm 7


An official from Changzhou (L) shakes hands with Lexifone CEO Dr. Ike Sagie after the two signed a memorandum of understanding for the opening of an R&D center in the Chinese city (Photo credit: Courtesy)RELATED TOPICS
ISRAELI START-UPSLINGUISTICS SOFTWARETELEPHONY TECHNOLOGYMOBILE APPSMOBILE TECHNOLOGYLEXIFONE
“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.

more

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-firm-talks-up-mankinds-recovery-from-the-tower-of-babel/