Alternative Transducers for Handheld Automatic Speech Recognition in Military Environments

The DARPA Phraselator currently deployed in overseas military operations is capable of translating spoken English language phrases into audible Pashto, Urdu, Dari, and Arabic language phrases. Although usable, the Phraselator is highly vulnerable to typical military environment noise resulting in significant loss of accuracy due to the limitations of existing microphone technology. Therefore the objective of this research project is to develop an alternate microphone that is immune to the surrounding military noise. In Phase I, Mayur Technologies Inc. conducted a feasibility study and was successful in demonstrating a novel noise-immune bone conduction microphone (here after called BF Mic) with a major breakthrough in the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) improvement and accuracy. The proposed Phase II is to further develop BF Mic by adding wireless capability and refine the design specifically for Phraselator applications. The functional prototype of wireless BF Mic will be tested both using the civilian and military human subjects. Further, the design will be hardened for military use and batch production. The wireless BF Mic will be ideal for operational critical applications such as military communications, air traffic controllers, helicopters, and coast guards; and personal productivity enhancement applications such as language translators and speech to text systems.