5 New Things That Will Blow Your Mind

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Cross Talk
You're on vacation in China, trying to get directions to a hotel, when you realize you've left your Mandarin phrase book on the plane. Fortunately, you have your Pocket PC, equipped with IBM's Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator. MASTOR recognizes both Mandarin and English, automatically translating what it hears into the other tongue, so two people who speak different languages can have a conversation. In a TIME test, when told the phrase "I would like to rent a motorboat," MASTOR translated it audibly and flashed a picture of a boat onscreen. Although in its infancy—right now it can handle only English, Mandarin and a bit of Spanish and Arabic—the software is in pilot programs. Systems featuring MASTOR may crop up at airports, banks and hospitals in the next few years.

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HANS MONDROW, East Germany's last communist prime minister, on the East German soldiers who ignored orders to shoot to kill those crossing into West Germany and made the decision to open the border on Nov. 9, 1989
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Quotes of the Day »

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HANS MONDROW, East Germany's last communist prime minister, on the East German soldiers who ignored orders to shoot to kill those crossing into West Germany and made the decision to open the border on Nov. 9, 1989

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