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Friday, March 22, 2002

In the war against terrorism, "Q" comes in the person of Lt. Col. Bill Bass, a loquacious drum-beater and distributor of the latest inventions from DARPA, the government agency that produced the first Internet and gave the military unmanned aerial vehicles through its contractors.

In Kandahar after a stop at Bagram, the main U.S. military camp outside Kabul, Bass is distributing two goodies to the troops -- a fourth-generation, task-specific voice input and audio output language translator and a mini-flashlight-sized water purification unit that is 99.9 percent effective in completely debugging fluids for drinking.

"This MIOX (micro oxidation) pen does everything but desalinate -- that comes next," Bass told United Press International. "You can fill a canteen with even your urine and it will come out tasting like pure water."

DARPA's -- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- Rapid Multilingual Support unit, called the phraselator, is produced by Marine Acoustics Inc. and is unlike any language translator on the commercial market today. First, it is task specific -- in Operation Enduring Freedom's case, the phrasing categories are force protection/law enforcement, refugee processing and reunification and medical triage.

Its language programs -- speech synthesis programs developed through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- come in Afghanistan's various dialects: Pashto, Dari, Arabic and Urdu. Tajik and Uzbek are in the works. There are nine other language programs available, including Mandarin. Each language has about 1,000 phrases the speaker normally would use in specific tasks.

Baseline phrases, for example, include greetings, date-and-time questions and answers and numbers. Force protection and law enforcement phrases include "be quiet," "drop the gun" and "hands up."

A new program is coming on line geared to military police guarding detainees in Afghanistan and it will include instructions in case of emergency.

Produces Human Voice

The neatest thing, though, is it is audio. Although the operator can tap stored, written phrases in English with a wand for instant translation and voicing, he or she also can speak them into the unit, which then produces a human voice, which projects the phrase in the language needed through the unit's loudspeaker, which also can be hooked up to larger external speakers for better projection.

No HAL-speak, as in the movie "2001," for this unit -- since the voice is human, it is fluid, full of inflection, rhythm and accent.

"It makes sense; I can understand it," said Abdul, an Afghan videographer with an international TV service, when asked to listen to it. "It's understandable, but it has a northern Pashto accent."

Bass said he also tried it out on an Afghan work unit on the base, telling them to "drop their weapons."

"They understood," he said. "They got all excited and started saying they didn't have any weapons."

The phraselator weighs just 20 ounces with batteries. It's a bit larger than two Palm Pilots or a hand-held video game. It's also fully Windows Pocket PC compliant and can be used to log onto the manufacturer's Web site for adding additional phrases and words the operator may need.

The phraselator earlier in the week was given to guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and to special U.S. military units in the area.

Going to MPs

In Kandahar, Bass is distributing the units to military police and other special groups.

Bass said the Federal Aviation Administration is also interested in the phraselator, and since they are produced by contractors, they eventually will make their way to the commercial market. Berlitz also has expressed interest in the gizmo.

Cost? To recoup research and development expenses, on a 5,000-unit production run, the units would be sold for about $1,800 each. With a 10,000-unit run, $1,000 per.

In six months, a "one-plus-one" unit will be available. With that, the phraselator will pick up responses, based on key words, and relay them back to the operator. In a year's time, a full two-way unit will be available, featuring the ability to interpret the semantic meaning of words and phrases voiced by the responder.

For Army Scouts, Bass is handing out the MIOX pen units, which have been certified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. To avoid getting sick from contaminated water, the user simply pours a sample of the fluid into the unit, which within 30 to 120 seconds analyzes its content and then produces the proper chemicals to neutralize bacteria and other dangerous content.

The agent then is poured into the canteen with the fluid, and within 15 minutes it's potable. Each pen, with a single analyzation unit and chemical mix, is good for about 300 canteens of water.

Copyright 2002 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Al-Qaeda

War on Terrorism

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