Imagine talking into a microphone in English and having your desktop computer computer translate and say it in Japanese. Until recently, this was only science fiction.

Traditionally, research in the fields of Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Speech Synthesis, and Dialogue Control have been conducted pretty much independently of each other. ATR is the first lab to seriously look into creating robust solutions to overcome problems associated of bringing these fields together.

Mr. Ben Reaves will talk about ATR's speech translation system project, ATR-Matrix. He'll describe how his group is integrating software from each field (recognition, translation, synthesis, dialogue control) and will provide demonstrations of the working translation system.

Mr. Benjamin Reaves graduated from the University of Southern California before going to graduate school at Stanford University. Since 1985 he has worked in software development for speech processing. Mr. Reaves now manages the Technical Support Group Software Development Team at ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Laboratory in Kyoto. His group recently completed a speech translation system between Japanese and English that can be used to make hotel room reservations. He has lived in Japan since 1989, and is very fluent in Japanese reading and speaking.