Chinese translation service stutters into life
Published: 07 Aug 2008 17:24 BST
A new automated phone translation service has suffered an outage immediately after launch.
The service, Jajah.Babel, is run by VoIP company Jajah in conjunction with technology from IBM Research. It works by listening to short phrases in English or Mandarin, then playing back a synthesised translation in the other language.
At launch, the service was offered on US and UK telephone numbers, but although initial reports were positive it was unavailable for least 10 hours prior to the time of writing; callers were asked to speak the phrase in their language, but after a few moments of music had the call dropped. Tests by ZDNet.co.uk in London showed it unavailable before 15:00 GMT on 7 August, but working an hour later.
When it works, the service is intended as a phrase-by-phrase aid for travellers, with the phone handed over to the listener or placed on speakerphone after the phrase is spoken.
"We'll have it working in time for the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games", promised Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf. "The problem came when we converted the system from the test environment to the live environment, in routing calls through from our network centres to the IBM Research systems in California. The network architecture was designed to put calls through the telephone system for as far as possible before going onto the internet, to reduce latency."
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Scharf said there would be no problem with capacity once the network was fixed. "All our services are scaled for much broader use than we see, because we care about quality. We always have a big margin for special circumstances. The only time we've been stretched was when we offered free calls for Christmas, when we saw a million calls in two or three hours. There's no reason for everyone to use the Babel system at the same time."
The service will be on a toll-free number within China for small amounts of use, but after a certain amount of minutes — which will be dynamically decided by monitoring software — users will be prompted to enter credit-card details for further use. Following a successful roll-out during the Olympics, the company plans to add other languages and further call access points around the world. At the time of writing, the Chinese number had not been launched.
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