SpeechGuard: Handheld Language Translation

• NCJ Number: 223919
• Journal: Law and Order Volume: 56 Issue: 6 Dated: June 2008 Pages: 38-42
• Author(s): Thomas M. Manson
• Date Published: June 2008
• Length: 5 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Technical)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article describes the development of the SpeechGuard for use by law enforcement officers in the field, enabling them to speak English phrases into the device, which are then translated by the device into the specified language of a non-English-speaking person with whom the officer is interacting.

Abstract

When U.S. law enforcement agencies learned that soldiers in Iraq had been provided with a device that enabled them to translate English phrases into Arabic automatically, they saw the possibilities for the domestic use of such a device with non-English-speaking immigrants on the streets of American cities; however, Ectaco, the electronic translation company that had developed the device for the U.S. military, did not have an existing mission-specific device for domestic public-safety personnel. In 2004, Ectaco’s first step in the development of such a device was to ask 250 of the largest U.S. law enforcement agencies to evaluate the software and devices the company had developed for the military from the perspective of their agency needs. Sixty-two agencies agreed to do this. These departments provided Ectaco with feedback on both the interface, the functionality of the device, and the content of phrases for which translations were needed, i.e., commands, phrases, and questions typically used in officer interactions with non-English-speaking persons. In addition, these agencies provided Ectaco with a “wish list” of languages to be translated by a law-enforcement version of the SpeechGuard. Nine languages were incorporated in the first SpeechGuard PD-4 for law enforcement that entered the market in August 2004. These languages were Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Chinese (Mandarin), Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Farsi. The second-generation device, the PD-5, includes the capability of learning and adjusting itself to up to 30 specific users, responding to verbal statements from specific individuals.