He even tried to teach himself Arabic using the device but decided it was no match for the complex language. Even such simple phrases as “What is your name?’’ are spoken differently in Fallujah than in Baghdad, he found. “This may have been the reason why many of the Iraqis ... did not appear to understand the Arabic phrases and words’’ stored in the device, said a report prepared for the Army.

“What people would really like is that Star Trek universal communicator, but it doesn’t exist yet,’’ said Lynne McCann, former chief of the Army Foreign Language Proponency Office. “That would solve everything.’’

VoxTec, a Maryland company, was asked to rush production of its Phraselator in 2001, said Ace Sarich, the company’s vice-president of development. The device is about the size of a PDA and is programmed with about 700 Arabic phrases that can be recalled after it “hears’’ the equivalent English phrase The company shipped 20 to Afghanistan within a few months, but the prototypes had bugs, including buttons that were hard to push and faulty batteries. Those issues have all been addressed, he added.

While VoxTec continued to improve the device, the military began testing a device made by a California company, Integrated Wave Technologies Inc. It had developed a similar hands-free version of a translation machine that fit into an ammunition pouch, allowing soldiers to say key phrases that are then turned into full Arabic sentences. “You say ‘house search’ and then it will say in Arabic: ‘We’re here to search your house. Please stay in this room. Do you have any weapons?’ ” said Tim McCune, the company’s president.

Neither product, however, proved robust enough to replace human interpreters. What soldiers really needed, the military decided, was to have a conversation with the people they encounter, not just give orders. “During door-to-door searches, the soldiers need to be able to calm the people down and reassure them,’’ said Wayne Richards, branch chief for technology implementation at US Joint Forces Command.

So the Pentagon turned to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to enlist some technology powerhouses, setting aside $20.8 million this year for translation technologies. Military officials said they do not expect the automated devices to replace human interpreters but to augment them. DARPA was a natural fit to lead the project because it has spent the past two years creating a database of thousands of hours of Iraqi conversations to study the voices, speech patterns and commonly used phrases to help with speech-recognition software.

The agency selected SRI International, a nonprofit research group, IBM Corp., and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to help put that database to work. Each of the three has developed systems that use mathematical algorithms to interpret speech, even if it is slurred, accented or muffled, into Arabic and the Arabic response into English. After a second or two, a synthesised male voice produces a response. The systems usually require speakers to limit their conversations to one sentence at a time to avoid confusion.

IBM estimates its system has an accuracy rate of 85 to 90 percent, and that out of 30 phrases, a person may need to repeat four or five. SRI and Carnegie Mellon officials said they couldn’t provide comparable figures. But “soldiers are looking for things that work 95 percent of the time,’’ Maeda said.

—Renae Merle / (Washington Post)