Military Technology - Text To Speech in Iraq and Afghanistan

So i’m at astricon listening to some talks. One talk was by the smart people at Cepstral who were involved in the open source Festival text to speech project. The technology is interesting, the quality of tts is getting better. But what amazed me most is some of the languages they are working on. The two languages that have high priority the development list are pashto and iraqi arabic. They are building hand held computers which combine machine translation, speech to text, and text to speech. What that gives you is you can send out soldiers in to the field and they can ‘speak’ to people who don’t share a language and who maybe aren’t literate.

I wonder if one day we’ll say that Afghanistan and Iraq are benefiting from the occupation just like India was ‘given’ the railroads as part of england’s colonialism.