TOMSK, Mar 28 – RIA Tomsk. Undergraduates of Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) develop a mobile application, which will allow to translate the sounding speech into a sign language by means of an ordinary smartphone, that deaf people could communicate with people around without signer, the press service of the higher education institution has reported.
"The app, on which undergraduates of the Institute of cybernetics of TPU Vitaly Vidman and Aleksandra Repetskaya work, will become the intermediary in communication with the interlocutors, who have defects of hearing. The program will instantly translate the sounding speech into a sign language and display animation on a smartphone", – it is said in the message.
It is specified that the app will transform the sounding words to the text, and the text – to the animated pictures with gestures. The biggest complexity is to make so that the program translates the syntactic constructions right, because the sign language has a special grammatical system. To solve this problem, the authors of the project plan to cooperate with professional signers.
According to the press service, the app will display not only the whole words, but also work with the tactile (manual) alphabet, thanks to which it is possible to spell compound words – for example, proper names. Now the developers have already created the app prototype, however "vocabulary" of the program is still limited, and it is possible to enter words only from a keyboard.It is added that the application can also be used as a dictionary or a tool for adaptation of difficult texts – for example, scientific. It will help deaf people to study.
"The program will help with studying of new gestures. In daily communication people use only a limited set and therefore can not know some words. We will load the extensive dictionary, which will include also special terminology. Looking through the sign translation, people with a hearing disorder will be able to study new words", – it is explained in the message.