Speech Technology and the Expat Community
There is an underserved group of people for whom speech applications can be a lifeline to health and happiness: the expat community. “Expat,” for expatriate, refers to someone living outside of their native country. Many expats are overseas workers; there are 85 million working expats worldwide. But the other major group of expats consists of retirees: The movement to retire in other countries, as seniors seek out hospitable areas with lower costs of living, is growing exponentially. And speech technology can help expats adjust to their new surroundings.
It’s clearly a trend that’s not going away. Panama is a major retirement spot for Americans and Canadians. Thousands move there each year for the low rents and healthy organic food at affordable prices. Nearby Costa Rica has 1.3 million expats and is often called “Little Switzerland” because entire villages consist of French-, Italian-, and German-speaking Swiss retirees. Spain, with its 5.1 million expats, is the retirement center for Germany, the Netherlands, and other European countries. Growing expat communities in Thailand (4 million), Indonesia (350,000) and the Philippines (1 million) offer living standards that people need to enjoy life on fixed incomes: good hospitals, good food, accessible physical support services.
What expats have in common is that their native language is often not the tongue of their surrounding community. They can struggle for years to communicate, with cheap general-vocabulary language translation apps their chief helper. Yet they have the funds and would gladly invest in better apps if they existed. Moreover, internet access can be a problem. In Panama, for example, expats’ homes might receive unlimited high-speed internet access via fiber-optics at $50 per month, but once the expats step outside, their hotspots do not function as well as they do in the U.S or Canada.
Specialty Apps Are Needed for Expats
As seniors move out of their native countries to retire elsewhere, speech translation can make the difference between a life well lived and a life that is lonely and isolated. These seniors’ well-being depends upon an ability to communicate with the locals, often for critical, and technical, matters.
How can a person sit with an immigration attorney who speaks another language to organize a retirement visa using only simple tourist phrases for restaurants and taxis? An app would need to emphasize legal terminology related to lodging rentals, property purchases, and entry and exit visas (particularly retirement visa acquisition). Even more crucial are medical apps; for seniors, there is a dire need for translation apps to aid in conversations with doctors and other medical professionals at hospitals. Yet another specialty app would relate to pet care. Retirees often bring their dogs and cats to their new homes, yet cannot converse with the local veterinarians.
Contentment Depends on More Convenient Communication
Expat communities are composed of people who are seeking to live a full life in a new country. They’re cooking at home, they’re buying organic produce at farmers’ markets, they are acquiring fish directly from local fishermen at the shore. And because they are living a full life, not a touristic life, conversations may become almost impossible using “toy” translation applications.
It’s an ideal opportunity to finally combine speech translation with photos and video. A translation app specifically for cooking lends itself perfectly to adding photos and video to more quickly explain a shopper’s needs, whether they’re ingredients like thyme, chia seeds, or ginger or the full range of cooking techniques (bake, broil, sautée, and whip). If a buyer is looking for essential oil of lavender, a photo of the bottle and flower can make the difference between confusion and communication. A speech translator is the perfect place to combine translation with visuals.
Since speech technology’s inception, developers have tried to cover everything with one app and have done spectacularly well, when good internet connections are available. Translation applications have been designed generally by people without a driving need to use the app themselves, and then offered to users as is. As the varied needs of expats illustrate, now may be an excellent time in our technology’s evolution to create DIY applications that are customized by the user, versatile, with vocabulary directed toward specific activities and translation needs, and appropriate to the exact person using the application—and with the ability to pick and choose subject matters to build one’s own personal speech app.
Sue Reager specializes in across-language speech communication, applications, and context engines. Her innovations are licensed by Cisco Systems, Intel, and telecoms worldwide. For the prior 20-plus years Reager was responsible for translating software and media in Europe, Africa, South America, and the United States.
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