Fergie's Tech Blog

Spyboys Go Web 2.0

Via Defense Tech.

Last week, the New York Times and some civil libertarians got all grossed out by a government plan to monitor the foreign press for its opinions of America. "It is just creepy and Orwellian," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said.

So no one tell Lucy about this system keeping tabs on overseas TV channels, 24/7, for the military, ok? She's liable to get real upset.

BBN Technologies' Broadcast Monitoring program pumps a TV channel -- Al-Jazeera, say -- through a set of servers, which do a quick-and-dirty transcription of the audio into Arabic text. Then, that text is ported into English.

The initial results are something short of Berlitz. "Did not professional background political motive for fighting veil as might be introduction," was the interpretation for one recent Al-Jazeera news snippet. But it's good enough for keyword searches, or to give human translators the heads-up when there's something relevant happening.

posted by Fergie @ 10/12/2006 02:29:00 PM