Jajah, a popular VoIP service provider, has released a new English/Chinese translation service called JAJAH.Babel just in time for the Olympic Games. The service, which was developed in conjunction with IBM, allows users to call a free number to get a near-instant translation of spoken sentences. The service isn’t meant for voice calls abroad – instead, it’s a handheld translator. After speaking your message into the phone, you hand it to the person you’re speaking with, and the phone spits out the translated message.
Using the service is fairly simple, and should work from any phone line:
How does JAJAH.Babel work? From English to Chinese or in reverse:
Dial JAJAH.Babel from any phone. U.S. local access number: +1.718.513.2969
Choose which language you want your message translated into (either English to Chinese or Chinese to English)
Say your message and press #
You will be able to confirm that your message was properly understood by the system.
The message will automatically be played back in Chinese. If you wish, simply hand your phone to the other person or put the phone on loudspeaker so they hear the message.
The other person can then record a message in Chinese, following the steps above, and you will hear their message in English.
To help test the service I recruited TechCrunch intern Matthew Schulz, who is fluent in Chinese. His conclusion was that it worked surprisingly well. The translation from English to Chinese sounded a little bit awkward, but the meaning was obvious. As for speech detection, the service had some trouble when he spoke Chinese in his normal tone, but when he enunciated a bit more than usual the results were almost perfect.
For now, the service is limited to translations between English and Chinese Mandarin, but the companies plan to release new languages in the near future. You can get more information about the service along with more local access numbers here.
Why would they go for Chinese? Thats like the hardest language to learn(and I’m guessing translate), wouldn’t it make more sense to try it out on an easier language like Spanish to see if its viable
U know,it is said that the service is “in time” for the Olympic Games,so it’s a great try for each e-speaking person.Though Chinese is complex,it sounds a perfect begining.
Wish in 10-20 years,people from all over the world can communicate with each other in no-speaking-barrier way.
Its all about barrier to entry. The harder to get it the less competitor will be.
Chinese may be hard to learn to pronounce correctly for English speakers due to the tones, but the grammar isn’t too hard to learn. And based on the results of Google Translate on Chinese vs Japanese, I’d guess that Japanese must be harder for machine translation, given that there appears to be a larger corpus of translated Japanese media to train the translation on, yet the quality of results seem worse for Japanese.
(or to my untrained eye, I can usually read translated Chinese text, but Japanese often comes out as complete english jibberish)
$100 says yahoo ends up paying 350M for this company….w/300M in goodwill!
Can’t wait for the Cantonese version. Aren’t there more Cantonese speakers, anyway?
No, overall there are more Mandarin speakers. However, the overseas Chinese-speaking population is often mainly Cantonese speakers due to historical immigration patterns.
I saw this demoed at Jajah this evening. It’s flawless. Congrats to my buds at Jajah.
I reviewed this service a couple of times today and it’s pretty awful. I asked it it translate “Hi How are you” and it spit out the “Try again later” message at least 5 times. I don’t think this is anywhere close to near-to-instant translation and they should not launch a service if they are not ready.
Is Google trying to combine blog search results with normal web search?
Read http://codeinsp...ombine-its.html
Amazing tool. Maybe someday we’ll all be speaking the same language.
Hmm, interesting stuff!!
Had to be created one day, even better than the Olympics are here now!
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Tried it out this evening.
With the sentence – “Hello, I’m hungry, can you tell me where to get some food?”
I waited 3 minutes before I gave up.
Fairly nice hold music though.
As long as they’re using a US-based number, it’s pretty expensive useless for those living in China or visiting it for the Olympics… but I welcome the developments
Andrew: Chinese isn’t the hardest language to learn to speak – grammatically it is very simple, it’s primarily the writing and the tones that give the biggest problem and what may cause some problems.
cromwellian: Japanese grammatically is considerably more complex than Chinese, and the typical sentence is Subject-Object-Verb (as opposed to English which usually is Subject-Verb-Object) so it could be harder for a machine to get right, but it does have quite consistent sentence structure, so I’m sure it’s one of those things they’ll eventually iron out.
Lollyham: Yahoo is one of the biggest sites for Chinese speaking communities and Jerry Yang is hailed as a business hero in Taiwan, so I’m sure they’ll certainly be looking into it
Not sure about the price.
scarabic: Mandarin has way more speakers (in total) than Cantonese 885 million vs 97 million according to Wikipedia. However, the vast majority of Chinese people living abroad (i.e. UK/US/Canada) hail from Hong Kong and Guangzhou (formerly Canton – as in Cantonese)… So the Chinese you come into contact on a day-to-day basis outside of China are most likely to speak Cantonese.
Ithaca Real Estate Guy: You may very well be right –
http://www.wire.../16-07/st_essay
One of the problems with Japanese is that a lot of things are not explicitly said but implied by context. This makes machine translation more complex because it can’t be done sentence by sentence independently. Context has to be preserved across sentences.
Interesting. That means that the state of the art of speech recognition has advanced some.
So has text-to-speech – check out Odiogo.com. Though it makes mistakes for a few words, overall its very good.
- Vasudev
I tried to use the service from Shanghai, and reviewed my experience: http://biesneck...-for-primetime/
In short: it kept telling me to call back later (after recording) and then hanging up. Seems like a fun toy, and maybe the start of something bigger, but I’d hate to be in Beijing, lost, and relying on it.
Wow, Jajah are really cutting the launch close with the Olympics in China. Surely it would of been better to launch maybe two weeks or so ago, giving the world a bit of time to hear about the service before the Beijing Olympics begin?
Seems waaaaay cool. This could be useful when spending time with my GF’s dad who only speaks Chinese. Too bad there’s no access number for Taiwan
These guys will have a huge profit this year. China and America are dominating with their worldwide internet users.
What is this for? How do i know if the translation is correct? Am i supposed to use by speaking my phrase (I’ll have the number 2 without MSG) and then hand the phone to my waiter so he can hear the translation? Seriously, what’s the use case. Cool tech though.
I doubt this will ever be popular. Chinese is a language with a rich vocabulary and history, one in which there are multiple ways to say the same thing, each subtly different from the other.
As a fluent Chinese speaker, not only can I assure you that it’s not the hardest language in the world for native English speakers to learn (tones be damned), but I am also certain that immediate English – Chinese translation will never work well.
With a US number (international call) and what appears to be a long delay or a message telling the customer to call back this seems to be fairly useless. There are live telephone interpreter services in China that could provide a far superior service without making an international call.
I’d rather just use my C3PO.
This does NOT understand a british english accent, but in theory, is very cool!
* calls jajah *
“i’m choking to death on this smog. help!”
* jajah translates *
* great firewall *
“i love china. such clean, pure air!”
I’m a native Chinese speaker with a British English accent
I gave Jajah a go today… it’s pretty much screwed even with the English-to-Chinese translation of the most commonly used tourist phrase, ‘Can you tell me where the toilet is, please?.
Anyway, it will be a good laugh though seeing a tourist handing their phone to a puzzled waitress shouting out an incomprehensible translation.
Try https://lingpal.com, their service is free during the 08 Olympic for registered users. If you will no use the service much and just want to give it a try for comparasion, here is a promotional pin (if someone else is using it you will have to wait until they hang up) “Olympic888″ or “6596742888″.
That save much money!
It’s very useful for Chinese English translation!
Good idea, but probably impossible to implement efficiently.
I attempted to dial the number listed on its website: 1-718.513.2969. Instead of Jajah Babel, I got greeted by a sales pitch for Jajah Direct. Did this service get pulled?
Please let me know I think it’d be great to see it so I can test out.
maybe it’s too later for me to find this !Instant Chinese/English Voice Translation is sound very cool but it will be very hard to handle! believe me , i know the translation bussiness
I guess this was just for the Olympics and has been discontinued since…
I wonder if the system worked with person speaking English with different accents.
I tried the service and it appears that they have been doing a fairly good job, albeit with room for improvements.