AppTek Releases Omnifluent Mobile Speech Translation Apps
Applications Technology (AppTek) has released two speech-to-speech translation apps on the Apple App Store. For a limited time, users can download Omnifluent Mobile Arabic/English and Omnifluent Mobile Spanish/English at no cost.
The app currently only supports translations between English and Spanish and between English and Arabic. "Those are languages in demand in the U.S. for business travel as well as at patient intake at clinics across certain demographics we worked with," says Katie Nguyen, manager of finance and administration at AppTek. "We plan to expand into Chinese and German next."
Omnifluent Mobile can be used for numerous one-on-one, bidirectional communication and conversations. In addition to providing instantaneous and live speech-to-speech translation, it can record, transcribe, and archive the content for future reference. Once users download the app from the Apple App Store, they can speak directly into their iOS devices and receive immediate spoken translations. The speech input and output is also displayed as text on the screen.
Users can also access a large set of free preloaded phrases or record phrases themselves. Options to edit translations and alter the gender of the speaking voice are also available for natural-sounding responses.
The Omnifluent app is free for a limited time, Nguyen says, adding that the company is supported by advertisements that also run alongside the translations.
AppTek developed both the automatic speech recognition and machine translation technologies on its own. Acapela Group provides the text-to-speech technology used.
Though the apps are currently available only for Apple iOS devices, AppTek is currently working on porting to Android devices and expects those integrations to be available "relatively soon," according to Nguyen.
Omnifluent Mobile is part of AppTek's Omnifluent suite of human language technology products, enabling automated translation of multilingual audio, video, and text content across multiple languages and dialects. AppTek's patent-pending hybrid machine translation is combined with automatic speech recognition on a single integrated platform, providing a comprehensive speech translation tool.
AppTek just acquired the Omnifluent Human Language Technology from Leidos this past November.
That deal included all of Leidos' automated speech recognition and machine translation software, covering more than 30 languages and dialects.