Telephone Translation Goes to the Field

A new company has married several existing technologies to help people translate back-and-forth from English and Chinese. The company called Jahjah said the new free service uses a standard telephone to access the voice recognition and translation service, dubbed “Babel.” A person simply dials 1-718-513-2969, selects which way to translate, and then speaks a sentence into the phone in the appropriate language, followed by the pound (#) key. The service then responds with the same sentence in the other language. The service can be used with a speakerphone in the field, or with 3-way calling from an office or home. The service was just announced, and is considered to be in the beta phase.