The Air Force Wants A Universal Translator

It's hard for a military to win hearts and minds if none of its members speak the local language. Humans who grew up speaking a language and joined the military are the best solution, followed closely by interpreters recruited locally. For this reason, the military wants a technology that can work as an interpreter in real time--a universal translator, if you will. Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory put out a solicitation for such a device. Their solicitation says they want to conduct research and development in automatic speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, text-to-speech synthesis, as well as other speech and language processing technologies.