AT & T Executive Foresees Services on Superhighway

Services to be found someday along the information superhighway will include automatic language translations, according to G. Allen Pugh, general manager AT & T’s global communications systems in Ventura, which serves small business in the tri-counties region.

“What may sound like science fiction today is going to be business as usual within the next decade or two,” Pugh said, citing work being done by scientists at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories. “Of major importance to the Hispanic business community in Southern California, services on the superhighway will be bilingual.”

AT & T has already developed a real-time, two-way English-Spanish speech translator with a limited vocabulary, Pugh reported. By the year 2010, automatic speech recognition should be able to translate from one language to another, producing customized translations using an individual’s speech characteristics, he added.

The translation, he predicted, will be synthesized with the speaker’s voice characteristics.

“Imagine how much easier this will make life for small business owners who export their products and services and who do business in such a diverse community as Southern California,” Pugh said.