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Comment by dholowiski | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. I assumed it would be filled up with Spam right away, but it's not - they must be doing some kind of filtering to make sure only Egyptian callers can leave a message. Most of the messages are not in english (duh) but here are a couple english messages. I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too.

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=ajRkanRVekNqSGdwZWw4ZX...

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=dkxLMm1KTER2cG5jWkd2Z2...

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=b1FveVRBQ2tyRlpWNjFMam...

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"I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too."

It's because speech recognition does not exist for Egyptian Arabic.

There are some research programs, but no actual completed products.

This may be surprising to some, but speech recognition is only available in a small number of languages. Mainly European languages plus Chinese.

There is nothing preventing speech recognition in other languages, it's just no one has done it.

The language Egyptians speak is Arabic. Voice recognition software for that language does exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKHR_Software_Company#Speech_R...

All Arabic is not the same, it's not always even interunderstandable so it's important to distinguish which dialect you are referring to.

But I did not not know about them, and I did search. Perhaps Google doesn't either.

I understand that. Just from reading your comment I didn't know whether you were referring to the dead language, a nonexistent one, or the dialect...I'll go sit with the rest of the pedants ;)

Arabic has variants. Each Arabic country speaks a different variant, many words are changed. For example, in Tunisia, a good number of our daily used words are from French.

But that language is only used in public; books and newspapers uses the original language.

You mean like english? And all languages?

No, for English and French (the one I know), someone who understands the original language, can figure out most of the spoken language. However, for the variant of Arabic they can fail. My mother told me that in Kuwait native sellers turn to the original Arabic in order to be understood.

I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too.

I'd think the problem is that you're piling up two technologies known for being very approximate and the results would be likely to be pretty far off to the original meaning. Which is especially sensitive for the current situation.

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