The amazing thing about this setup is how this relatively simple prototype accomplishes such rapid speech recognition and translation at close to a conversational pace.

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But we know which approaches had the biggest commercial success: search engines, speech recognition, machine translation, word sense disambiguation, and other technologies.

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Perhaps one day, a glove like this could be part of a universal translator, which is something that will continue to be pursued as mobile computing, speech recognition, and translation advance.

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One example is speech-recognition and machine-translation technology.

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That means they have to rely on what is known as "relay" interpretation: interpreters listen to an English-language translation of say a Latvian speech, and use the English version to interpret into other languages.

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Understanding is crucial not only to accurate translation, but also for dictation and rendering text as speech.

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If you think one translation is not very good quality, when you put a speech system at either end, it gets worse.

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