Burying the Language Barrier

There are times when the inability to speak the local lingo is a matter of inconvenience, like when you're sitting in a restaurant on the other side of the world and can't figure out which menu item is escargot and which is steak tartare. Other times, it's a bit more important than knowing that beer is “cerveza” en Español.

For Ace Sarich, the inspiration to develop the Phraselator — a PDA-type wireless device that can be loaded with hundreds of common phrases translated into several languages matching the user's area of destination — came when he was a Navy Seal doing two tours of duty in Vietnam. He took a crash course in Vietnamese but didn't take to the language.

After discharge, Sarich went to graduate school to study mechanical engineering, and he hooked up with a friend who was working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to develop speech recognition technology. The friend asked Sarich what he could have used in Vietnam. His answer: “I told him I needed a hand-held device that could say, ‘Where's the village, chief?’”

A $1 million grant from DARPA and several years of development later, the Phraselator is a reality. It was developed by a consortium of four companies, including Middletown, N.J.-based VoxTec, which Sarich, VoxTec's chief operating officer and principal engineer, launched to handle overall product development and distribution.

The Phraselator's first meaningful order came from the Pentagon, which wants 500 units for troops stationed in Afghanistan. (The units, which translate about 500 phrases into Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and Dari, will be shipped next month and will set taxpayers back about $1500 per unit.) But Sarich dreams of the day when wireless carriers market the Phraselator in much the same way they market Nokia and Ericsson handsets. In addition, he's hoping to develop a two-way translation capability through which Phraselator users speaking different languages could converse with each other via wireless transmissions, a value-added service offering that could be marketed and provisioned by wireless carriers.

Besides being multilingual, the Phraselator also features a high-quality directional microphone, a codec designed specifically for speech recognition, a speaker loud enough to conquer ambient noise “in a typical office-type environment” and a rechargeable lithium battery that provides about three hours of use. (It also runs on four AA batteries.)

The one thing it doesn't have yet is a calendar, which Sarich might want to add soon, since he missed the original appointment for his Wireless Review interview. When finally reached, he said full PDA-type functionality will be added to the Phraselator eventually, but for now, he's content to introduce a European-centric translator for consumer use sometime this fall.

Yankee Group analyst Sarah Kim said she wants one, even though she already speaks four languages. But its market potential might be limited, she said, estimating that only about 5% of the U.S. population currently holds passports, and many of them never travel abroad. If business professionals who travel abroad for extended periods are the most likely users of the Phraselator, Kim said, that would shrink the addressable market considerably: “I can't think of too many tourists who would invest in this for a family vacation.”