There’s an interesting endgame to the Dial Directions story, as the pioneering voice search company announced today that it has been acquired by Sakhr Software, a company that specializes in natural language processing in Arabic. The resulting company will have 200 employees. Dial Directions’ CEO Adeeb Shanaa will have the same title at Sakhr, while the cheif executive of Sakhr, Fahad Al Sharekh, is elevated to chairman of the combined company, with the objective of building more business alliances and partnerships.

One of the early fruits of the partnership is an application for the Apple iPhone and RIM Blackberry that performs real time translation between spoken English and Arabic. This YouTube video provides a demonstration. Mobile translation of this sort is something akin to the Holy Grail of natural language voice processing. Offering the function as a Smartphone app is a real coup. It benefits from nearly twenty years invested by Sakhr in building a knowledge base of Arabic phrases to support optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation (MT), data mining and search.

Sakhr’s long-standing expertise in the field attracted the attention of BBN Technologies, which incorporated the technology into its work on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) GALE Project (referring to “Global Autonomous Language Exploitation” efforts to capture and recognize huge amounts of spoken words and text in a variety of languages. IBM and SRI have been vying with BBN over the past few years to make breakthrough advances in “natural language understanding” across a multitude of languages, dialects and modalities.

The mobile application is not related to GALE, but it is an impressive demonstration of Sakhr’s underlying technology. It is the product of a partnership between Dial Directions and Sakhr that dates back to 2008 when the two companies formed a developmental partnership to address “language application technology for mobile, cloud-computing environments.” The result was a “first of its kind open speech-to-speech mobile translation application for the U.S. government and business customers.”

The video demonstration is, indeed, impressive. The challenges surrounding transcription (even in a single language) are formidable. As the company brings the application to the marketplace it will need to manage user expectations surrounding “accuracy” – which is a very tough nut to crack in the transcription world where mis-recognizing a single word can distort the meaning of an entire utterance. In the commercial marketplace, that is the proverbial, technological elephant in the room.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Natural Language Understanding, Mobile Translation