As our world becomes increasingly interdependent and globalisation brings people together more than ever, it’s no longer the ‘digital divide’ that separates us, but the ‘language divide’ and its associated cultural differences.  Using our mobile phones we could connect with everyone, if only we shared a common language and a common understanding. Yet forcing uniformity is neither realistic nor desirable. Can technology provide an answer?

Alex Waibel discusses language technology solutions that offer the best of both worlds: maintaining our cultural diversity while enabling the integration, communication and collaboration that our modern world has to offer, and presents crosslingual computer communication systems both from the University lab and start-up ventures, including:

• a computer dialogue translator on laptops for humanitarian missions and government services
  
• a iPhone pocket speech translator for tourists and doctors – using Jibbigo, the world's first commercially available speech translator running on a phone
  
• a simultaneous translation system for real time academic lectures
  
• a road sign translator that reads and translates road signs from other languages and scripts

 Accompanied by live demos, this Keynote will be simultaneously translated into Spanish by computer.