BBN Technologies Awarded $2.8M to Advance Translingual Spoken Communications

BBN Technologies announced today that it has been awarded $2,799,825 in additional funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program.

The mission of the TRANSTAC program is to develop and field two-way translation systems that enable speakers of different languages to communicate with each another spontaneously in real-world, tactical situations.

Under this new funding, BBN will enhance the current system to better serve users in varied domains and geographic locations. The BBN team will focus on key improvements in machine translation, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and the system architecture.

Under previous funding from the TRANSTAC program, BBN incorporated its state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition and machine translation capabilities into a portable, two-way translation device that runs on standard laptop, tablet, or notebook computers. The device, called BBN TransTalk, acts as a translator, allowing people who do not speak each other’s languages to converse effectively.

Prem Natarajan, vice president of BBN, said, "By breaking the language barrier to spoken communications, BBN TransTalk enables timely conversational exchanges that can save lives in difficult environments.”