Communications Media

The Owasys company in Zamudio has chosen Babel technology, world leader and pioneer in speech technologies, for its new Owasys22C mobile telephone. This mobile phone has been designed and developed by Owasys specifically for those persons who are blind or visually impaired. Initially the Owasys22C will have the Spanish and English version of Babel so that other languages can be added afterwards.

The launching of the Owasys22C on to the market will enable the visually impaired and the blind t

Scientists explore how we could interact with computers

Imagine ordering your meal in a restaurant by a simple tap on the table, transmitting your choice direct to the kitchens. Or placing an order for goods by making your selection on the surface of the shop window.

It may sound like science fiction, but this could be the way we interact with computers in the future, thanks to a pan-European research project, led by experts at Cardiff University, Wales, UK.

“The v

Researchers have successfully tested a system that can replace a cellular tower’s room full of communications hardware with a single desk-top style computer, making the technology affordable for small, rural communities.

The software is also capable of running emergency communications-such as police, fire and ambulance channels-on the same device as the civilian system, eliminating the need for a separate network of emergency communications towers.

“Rural customers are the firs

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., has opened the door to using reliable digital video as evidence in court by developing a system that identifies an attempt to alter digital video evidence.

“It’s not too hard to make changes to digital video,” says Tom Duerr, APL’s project manager. “But our system quickly and conclusively detects any alterations made to the original tape.” For the past two years Duerr has led development of the project for th

Scientists at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at the University of Southampton are nearing the end of the first phase of a study to assess whether the use of mobile phones has any adverse effect on the hearing of healthy young adults.

The study into Potential Adverse Effects of GSM Cellular Phones on Hearing (known by the acronym GUARD) is part of a joint European project funded by the European Commission being carried out simultaneously in several countries across Europ

Using phone numbers, remote controls and computer keyboards will likely seem quaint within a decade as new capability to turn human speech into accurate, efficient computer code radically changes the ways we live and work.

That’s the outlook of Lawrence R. Rabiner, associate director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in an overview of speech processing, “The Power of Speech,” in the journal Science, available Friday