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It's times like this when I realise that maybe I'm actually getting somewhere with my research. Last year Cisco announced that they were working on an automated translation service for their Telepresence video conferencing product. The service could apparently transcribe a user's speech, accurately translate it, and then 'read' the translation to the user's remote colleagues.

I recall when I read the news article, I was overcome with a resounding 'huh?' Machine translation is hard at the best of times without jamming speech recognition on top of it - but on top of that it doesn't make any sense - certainly not from what I've got from my research so far. It simply seemed more of an unneeded add-on that was designed to one-up competitors on paper rather than a well thought out solution to the problems faced by users. At the time I remember shooting off some emails to some colleagues and we all agreed, this wasn't feasible with current technology and that customers wouldn't be interested in it.

Anyway, I was browsing through my newsreader this morning and what should pop-up? A post over at Telepresence Options talking about the very same translation service and its no-show at a Cisco product launch for over 60 other collaboration technologies. Seems that it's been postponed with no estimated launch date - apparently it's too hard to do and no-one seems really interested - who'd have thought it? At least my research is progressing to the point where I can make accurate predictions about things like this - I'm starting to feel like I'm getting somewhere with things now!

(Hopefully) Related posts:

1. Telepresence and Second Life Predictions for 2010 OK, I’ll be hon­est with you, I’m prob­ably not the best per­son to make pre­dic­tions. I say that because I’m not hugely up to...