Google, Vocre, Apple, And Now Raytheon Diving Into Cloud Speech Recognition

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More

If you were following along at Disrupt SF, perhaps you caught Vocre’s impressive demonstration of their near-real-time spoken translation app. As I was watching, I was picturing the gears turning behind the veneer of the app, though: the cloud transcription, translation, and speech APIs, and how there’s a nice big market for this kind of thing. Google knows it, and of course we’ve had speech on Android for a long time. Apple knows it, but took its time to release it in a more consumer-focused package.

Now even defense contractor Raytheon is getting into the game. Their TransTalk app, which has emerged from the soup of defense contracts and government research funds that is DARPA, is specifically designed for deployment in the middle east.

It’s for Android, which jives with the military’s earlier lean towards the operating system, though it look simple enough that it wouldn’t be much of a task for the defense giant to port it to a government-sponsored fork or whatever gets decided on.

The app itself (running on a Motorola Atrix) is a simple affair; it’s meant for deployment with English-speaking troops and has very little in the way of decoration. You select a language (Arabic, Pashto, and Dari are supported, as these are the primary dialects in the middle east theater), speak to it, and it prints and speaks a translation. The other speaker does the same, but pressing a different button.

So the app isn’t noteworthy for its purpose, but what is interesting is that it isn’t a self-contained app, but rather calls out to the cloud. Military applications tend to concentrate as much functionality as possible on the local device, because as you may have heard, warfare tends to be on the unpredictable side, and data infrastructure isn’t guaranteed. So cloud solutions, as practical as they may be for a consumer application, have been viewed with skepticism by the military establishment.

On the other hand, could the choice be viewed instead as shrewd, considering the efforts that DARPA and others are going to in the creation of a connected battlefield? My guess is that this isn’t actually a strategic move, but a pragmatic one: they bait the hook with a cloud solution and reel it in when they’ve got the resources to make it something locally-hosted. Last year they showed a similar app but on a larger platform. Miniaturization isn’t a trivial step, and they probably thought it worthwhile to gauge interest with this cloud version before going all in. Right now the military smartphone platform is still in flux so it would be unwise to start loading their eggs into one basket or another. But decentralized processing isn’t such a bad bet to make, and Raytheon seems to understand that.

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Vocre Lets You Instantly Converse In Foreign Languages

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

It’s almost magical how Vocre works; Speak into the app while your iPhone is vertical, flip the phone horizontal and the phone’s accelerometer cues the app to translate and speak what you’ve said into the language of the people you’re speaking with, they then can respond, rinse, repeat.

To use Vocre, select the language and the gender of the person you’re going to be talking to, and Vocre does the rest.

Vocre views its competitive landscape as Google Translate and JibbGo, holding that what it does differently is focus on in-person dialogue and novel User Experience.  Vocre co-founder Andrew Lauder says that his ultimate aim is to make it fun and easy to speak a foreign language via a phone, “Our focus is on conversation, Google’s focus is translating web pages, but if you actually want to have a conversation it’s lacking.”

Vocre uses Nuance to convert speech to text and its own crowd-sourced machine learning technology to go beyond to the pitfalls of Google Translate to make that text intelligible. Then iSpeech re-converts the translated text back into audio. Vocre aims to make interaction between users who speak different languages seem somewhat natural.

The app monetizes through subscriptions and every new download comes with 10 free translations. Afterwards users can get another 10 translations for an extra 99 cents.  myLanguage, the company behind Vocre, plans on utilizing the in-house translation technology in order to add phone call and text features in the near future.

Vocre currently is available in the US App Store in 9 dialects including English (US, GB, AU), Spanish (Spain), French (France), German (Germany), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan) and Chinese (Mandarin/China). While right now phones need to be set to American English in order to use the app, Vocre plans on adding support for around 40 or so more languages over the next year, Lauder tells me.

Vocre currently has $50K in seed funding.

Q&A

JG: How about intelligibility?

A: It won’t pick up fake accents.

R: What’s the turnaround time?

A: It’s quick, but we’re actually doing a three step process.

YV: Foreign language.

MS: If this really works, it’s great. You have to work hard to keep the middle part differentiated. The idioms don’t translate that well.

WC: The situation where this comes in handy is a cab driver giving directions. How does this work when you don’t have a data plan?

A: Without a data plan this doesn’t exist. It doesn’t use a ton of data, but it’s there when you need it.

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