November 12, 1999 Web posted at: 8:42 a.m. EST (1342 GMT) by Ephraim Schwartz

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(IDG) -- Speech technology may steal the show at Comdex next week, with products that promise to amaze even the most high-tech weary of attendees.

Star Trek technology will come to life when ViA demonstrates its version of a universal translator. Similar to the devices used by the members of the United Federation of Planets, ViA's device is partially funded by the U.S. Navy and performs voice-to-voice translation with a wearable PC, headset, and speaker.

While ViA's device can not translate Klingon to Romulan, it does interpret seven other languages including Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Users can talk into the microphone in one language and the translated words will come out through a speaker in the second language.

ViA is using the Lernout & Hauspie speech and translation engines and will demonstrate the technology at Lernout & Hauspie's booth.

"We believe this solution demonstrates the value of fully distributed wearable processing," said Dave Carroll, chairman of ViA.

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The Wearable PC is a line of products allowing the user to select processor, storage, and display depending on the application, and starts at $2,000 for quantity purchases.

Translation will be more than wearable at the Comdex show, however.

GlobalTV, from MultiLingual Media, is an instant translation service that allows, for example, a global company to conduct an international video conference in one language while using closed-captioning technology to translate the speaker's words into numerous other languages, including French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

MultiLingual Media is using technology from Transparent Language, which will have its own announcement at Comdex. Transparent will announce the release of Enterprise Translation Server 3.0. using its TranscendRT machine translation technology. The Enterprise Translation Server starting price is $17,000 and is licensed by number of words translated.

Speech technology as a user interface to access information will also be unveiled at Comdex.

Dragon Systems and Totally Voice will announce Marnee, a speech-centric personal information manager application. Marnee will not only give users a voice interface to send e-mail messages, schedule appointments, and add address book entries, but it will also notify the user if there is a scheduling conflict as well as speech-enabled e-mail. Marnee will be available in December and will cost about $60.

Ephraim Schwartz is an InfoWorld editor at large, based in San Francisco.