There aren’t too many good-news stories coming out of Iraq, but here’s one. The U.S. military is bridging the communications gap within its soldiers and Iraqis by tapping some innovative speech recognition technology from IBM Research. Using a laptop computer or PDA, soldiers speak into a microphone and the software translates what they say in English into Arabic. Iraqi soldiers or civilians see and take in the words in Arabic, and their answers are immediately translated into English. About 10,000 of these systems are in use in the battle zone.

But what’s a boon for the U.S. military highlights a conundrum for IBM Research, which provides the technology gratis. When the military selected speech recognition technology for a new medical records network, it chose an offering from market leader, Burlington [Mass.]-based Nuance Communications. For all of IBM’s expertise and resources, the 3,000 or so scientists in its basic research facilities worldwide face a major challenge to shepherd

their innovations from the lab into the marketplace.

Partnering Up

David Nahamoo, the chief technology officer for IBM Research’s speech and translation division, is out to change that. On Aug. 18, Nahamoo announced a new strategy at SpeechTEK 2008, a gathering of the leaders in the speech recognition industry in New York City. Rather than trying to push its technology mainly through IBM’s product and services divisions, the speech research group is focusing on forming partnerships with other companies to take the technology to market. Partners include Vlingo, the company that provides speech services for Yahoo! oneSearch; PhoneTag, which converts mobile voice mail to text; and Jajah, which offers real-time phone translation amoung English and Mandarin. “We can find partners, spread the risk, and improve our ability to address these markets,” says Nahamoo.

IBM has been performing research into speech recognition for four decades. Some of the technology…

Original post by dhiram