Military

Raytheon to provide Army with automatic speech recognition capability

Raytheon BBN Technologies has been awarded a $4 million Army contract for automated language translation. 

Under the contract, Raytheon will provide automatic speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, and optical character recognition software licenses for one year to the Army's Machine Foreign Language Translation System Program office, according to a company news release.

This is the first large-scale fielding of the Machine Foreign Language Translation System.

"With Machine Foreign Language Translation System, U.S. Army personnel can converse with Iraqi Arabic and Pashto speakers and understand foreign language documents and digital media on three platforms," according to Raytheon.

The system works on Android hand-held devices, Windows laptops and servers, and a battalion-level intelligence system that the company did not identify.