Windows Phone Thoughts: Pocket PCs As Speech Translators

"As speech recognition technology gets better, and as handheld computers get more powerful, audio translators are becoming a more practical proposition. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Cepstral, LLC, Multimodal Technologies Inc. and Mobile Technologies Inc. have put together a two-way speech-to-speech system that translates medical information from Arabic to English and English to Arabic and runs on an iPaq handheld computer. The prototype falls short of Star Trek's fictional universal translator in several ways. The system is not transparent -- it must be switched between Arabic-to-English and English-to-Arabic modes. It also works only when the speakers are talking about medical information, and it's only about 80 percent accurate in the lab. The device shows that it's becoming possible, however, to provide automatic translation using a portable device."

It's still very application-specific, but is the beginning of a very cool premise -- your PDA becoming your personal communicator. This has been sci-fi fodder for years -- I can't wait for the day when it's reality. 8)