Navy Shows Off Hi-Tech Gadgets

NEW YORK, May 26, 2006 -- -- It's Fleet Week in New York, where for the last 19 years, thousands of sailors and Marines have hit the city to blow off steam, and even more civilians get the chance to see some of the military's newest technologies, even those still under construction.

This year the Office of Naval Research, which has partnered with companies both public and private to keep our fighting men and women on the cutting edge, showed off some high-tech gadgets that could be making their way to the private sector sometime soon.

Though a super-sonic cruise missile is unlikely to be available at your local Costco or Wal-Mart, translation and communication technology on display could change how and with whom we speak.

In one corner of the USS Kearsarge, a massive aircraft carrier spending the week docked at Pier 88 in Manhattan, one of the Navy's most exciting projects lives, unimpressively, in a commercial laptop on a small banquet table.

But what is simply known as Restore and Interact is anything but unimpressive.

Restore is a program that can restitute wrinkled, stained and doodled-on foreign-language documents, like the ones soldiers find all the time in Iraq, to their original form.

Then comes the "wow" part. The program interprets and then translates the document into English, or another chosen language.

"In a matter of a few seconds, the document is cleaned and translated," explained Sean Lanahan, business development manager for SpeechGear Inc., the company behind the technology.

But Lanahan said that's only one part of its overall goal.

"Our mission is to be able to translate anything you hear, read, say, write or type," he said.

To that end, the second part of SpeechGear's project, Interact, is a voice translator more advanced than anything you've seen before.

If you speak into a microphone, the computer understands what you say, and with just a few clicks of the mouse or by just tapping the buttons using a touch pad or tablet PC, the software translates what you've said into text but also verbally translates it, speaking in a synthesized voice.