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.
© РИА Томск. Павел Стефанский
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.