Just in time for the Beijing Olympics, VoIP company Jajah has launched its automated Jajah.Babel service in the UK and US, which allows English-Mandarin and Mandarin-English translation. It employs technology from IBM Research to listen to short phrases then offers a translation in a synthesized voice.
But, according to ZDNet, it was barely out of the blocks when it fell at the first hurdle, suffering a lengthy outage.
However, said Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf, “we’ll have it working for the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games. The problem came when we converted the system from the test environment to the live environment, in routing calls through from our network centres to the IBM Research systems in California. The network architecture was designed to put calls through the telephone system for as far as possible before going onto the internet, to reduce latency."
In China the service will be available on a toll-free number for limited use, after which callers will need to enter credit cards details for further use. Jajah plans to add other languages and access points around the globe.
