MCLEAN, Va. (February 2, 2009) – The AppTek-sponsored Olin contest explores using the AppTek webservices backend -- which includes a set of tools for language identification, machine translation, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech services for a variety of languages -- to develop a compelling prototype Android application.

Students will divide into 4-5 teams and work on delivering a prototype that will be judged by Olin professors and representatives of AppTek.  

The contestants believe that:  “… AppTek's language technology provides a unique opportunity to further bridge the language gap. There are many applications that simply translate text, but AppTek's tools allow us to develop translation software specifically geared at facilitating direct communication between people who speak different languages. By using AppTek's voice recognition capabilities along with text translation, we have produced an application that can effectively serve as a communication bridge.”