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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
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![]() At this point in the novel, Ralph meets Alice and hits the language barrier. As always, he is prepared to succeed in this difficult circumstance thanks to science.
Compare to the translatophone from My Translatophone (1901), by Frank Stockton. Compare to Translator Discs from Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven and the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams.
The first actual efforts at attempting machine translation of speech came in the late 1940's and early 1950's as the US government was trying to transcribe and translate Russian documents. (The agency responsible for the research later came to be known as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency - DARPA - which also presided over the invention of TCP/IP, which brought us the Internet.)
The earliest real-world development of machine translation can be traced to conversations and correspondence between Andrew D. Booth, a British crystallographer, and Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1947, and more specifically to a memorandum written by Weaver in 1949 to the Rockerfeller Foundation which included the following two sentences.
True speech recognition was not available until 1952; Bell labs created a machine system that could distinguish the spoken numerals 0-9. By 1960, this system was upgraded to recognize - 60 words. Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
'Courier Commons' By Tomorrow Lab, From Karl Schroeder (and Bruce Sterling?)
'The pokkecon rang again. *The coffee’s for him?* Tsuyoshi said.'
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'Chain of hotels that specialized in non-human service.'
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'Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse.'
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