Sept. 28, 2007 — Converting speech into sign language is normally a job for a human translator. But now an animated character is up to the task.
The "Say It Sign It" system translates spoken words into sign language and then engages an avatar to communicate using gestures. The onscreen translator could work as a pop-up on a television, personal computer, mobile phone or auditorium screen, giving the hearing impaired wider access to television, radio and education.
"It was inspired by a vision that a deaf colleague on my team had of seeing, not words being brought up on his phone, but an animated character signing in British Sign Language," said Andy Stanford-Clark, master inventor at IBM Hursley in the U.K.
The colleague was Ben Fletcher who, at the time, was an intern for Extreme Blue program. Fletcher is deaf and British Sign Language is his first language.
"He was able to give feedback and keep us honest," said Stanford-Clark. After returning to school and completing his degree, Fletcher became a permanent member of the team, which also includes researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Durham, Glasgow and East Anglia.
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The program has about three main components. First a voice recognition system takes words spoken into a microphone and converts those into a stream of text. The text is then sent through a translation program that looks for patterns in the words and applies different rules based on those patterns.
