Portable Bidirectional Speech Translator for Strat

This effort is a continuation of research work for SBIR PhaseI. The objective of this phase is to build prototype units for TranSphere SpeechAmbassador, a Portable Bilingual Speech Translation Device. TranSphere SpeechAmbassador will be a portable, wearable field translation device. It was designed to be minimally intrusive during normal use. It can overcome moderate noise levels and the device can connect to an external speaker for situations requiring extra volume. The design philosophy is to develop a custom, handheld device that will be specifically tailored to the required application: two-way speech translation in a hostile environment. This implies a rugged, battery-operated device that can be utilized with a minimum amount of user interaction. A "portable/mobile" version of AppTek's SpeechTrans System will be ported to work with the Portable Bilingual Speech Translator environment. The Speech Translation process (Speech-to-Speech Translation) is composed of three processes/technologies: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Automatic Text Translation (Machine Translation MT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS). The proposed effort under this proposal for Phase II includes the production of five (5) prototype units with the hardware and software components described in the Phase I Design Document.