Our Translation Assistant applies common sense logic to the problem of translating speech
in real time from one language to another. Using speech recognition combined with a software
translator to do word-by-word translation is not feasible because speech recognition is
notorious for poor results. Word-by-word translation requires grammatically correct input to
translate accurately. Therefore, translation of speech that is potentially already fraught with
errors is not expected to be good. Our Translation Assistant works around these problems by using
the context of the conversation as a basis for translation. It takes the location and the speaker
as input to establish the circumstances. Then it uses a common sense knowledge network to do
topic-spotting using key words from the conversation. It only translates the most likely topics
of conversation into the target language. This system does not require perfect speech recognition,
yet enables end-users to have a sense of the conversation.