Speech-to-speech translation services for the olympic games 2008

In 2008 the Olympics Games will be held in Beijing. For this purpose the city government of Beijing has launched the Special Programme for Construction of Digital Olympics. One of the objectives of the program is the use of artificial intelligence technology to overcome language barriers during the games. In order to demonstrate the contribution that speech-to-speech translation technology (SST) can make to solving this problem and in order to prove the feasibility of deploying such technology in the environment of the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing, we have developed the Digital Olympics Speech-to-Speech Translation System that addresses a general touristic domain with a special focus on pre-arrival hotel reservation. The system allows for rapid development of SST prototypes, the study of different user-interfaces and the on-the-fly comparison of alternative approaches to the individual problems involved in this task.