Voice Recognition Tech

[Anchor Lead]

A South Korean research team has developed a voice recognition technology that converts nine foreign spoken languages into writing and can even translate between them. The technology will help people communicate with others from around the world more easily. Let’s take a look.

[Pkg]

As a Chinese woman speaks into her smartphone, what she says is instantly converted into a Chinese sentence and translated into Korean.

[Soundbite] "It is raining outside today."

It is able to understand nine foreign languages, including Spanish, French and Arabic.

[Soundbite] "I heard that it is one of the biggest markets in South Korea."

It is a multilingual speech recognition program developed by the Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute with the application of artificial intelligence's deep learning technology. It can accurately convert as much as 95 percent of human speeches and conversations.

[Soundbite] Kim Sang-hoon(Head, ETRI Automatic Interpretation AI Research Center) : "When 95 percent of the words are accurate, we can offer speech recognition service."

The program has been already used on a trial basis at some companies since last year. It will be applied to various home appliances with a voice recognition function, which is currently dependent on foreign technology.

[Soundbite] Yoon Seung(Senior Researcher, ETRI) : "Tens or hundreds of billions of won have been annually paid to foreign voice recognition technology companies in royalties. Our development is expected to considerably reduce domestic companies' burden."

The institute plans to present the domestically developed voice recognition technology in full scale at the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games next year.