Noted inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is predicting that in a few years, one-quarter of the world’s population will be communicating across different languages via automated language translation software like Language Weaver’s.

Referring to a Jupiter research report predicting that 25 percent of world’s population will be online by 2012, Kurzweil predicts that language differences will no longer be a barrier to communication:

[Kurzweil] cites current developments in the speed and accuracy of statistical translation systems, which have improved exponentially in the past 10 years, such as Language Weaver’s automatic language translation software, which can now translate between 2,000 and 5,000 words per minute on a single CPU, using proprietary statistical translation algorithms.

According to a career summary posted on his website, Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. Ray’s books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Four of Ray’s books have been national best sellers and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray Kurzweil’s new book, published by Viking Press, is entitled The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology.

To read the full article about Kurzweil’s predictions on KurzweilAI.net, click here.

Language Weaver Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Marcu says that rapid advancements in the field of software-based statistical translation are providing government customers with a range of new, more powerful translation solutions.

Daniel is a recognized leader in natural language processing.

In the following podcast interview, Daniel says that both the speed and accuracy of statistical translation systems have improved exponentially in the past 10 years. He also explains how Language Weaver is working to further improve the applicability of its proprietary translation technology:

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