There are only 44 phonemes in English. It probably searches for and grabs all 44 (disjointed English guy says 20 minutes of speech is needed). I think he could get it to say "motherfucker caterpillar penis".

... A lot?
To be fair, it's a two-syllable word with the two most common vowels/phonemes in it. Just easy to rhyme I guess.

>> ^deathcow:

i'll take some fresh spring rolls, crispy spring rolls, pad ped kai, pad thai, basil chicken extra spicy, kang karie and some chicken satay


Since you clearly like your Thai food, I thought I'd reply here with some pronunciation and literal translation quirks about those menu items -- the staff at a Thai restaurant (assuming they are Thai anyway) will get a kick out of it if you play up the right angles. This gets long (sorry), so anyone not interested skip to the next post...

Spring rolls - "bpo bpeah" in Thai. The bp is a phoneme that we don't really have in English -- try to combine the two sounds but err on the side of sounding more like "p" than "b". The second word sounds sort of like "bpEEE-uhhh", or like how somebody with a thick Massachusetts accent would say "beer" or "peer". For crispy spring rolls, you would just add the word "toht" to the end, which means "fried" or deep fat fried -- "bpo bpeah toht".

Pad Ped Kai - Pad means "fried" also, but more like pan fried. Ped (sounds more like "pet") means "spicy". Kai means "egg". So all together I would think that would mean "stir-fried spicy egg", but it isn't a menu item that I have heard of before. I think that maybe the Kai should be Gai instead -- Gai means "chicken". The "g" sound in Thai is sort of halfway between a g and a k, so sometimes things get phonetically translated in different ways. But if it is chicken, make it sound more like a g; like "guy".

Pad Thai - sort of indirectly translates as "that fried dish that is famous/popular in Thailand", which is descriptive but not in a content / culinary way like most Thai food.

Basil Chicken Extra Spicy - the most popular Thai dish that is heavy on basil is Pad Kapow (sounds like the word for hitting someone; ka-POW). So, I bet that the Thai name for your Basil Chicken would be Pad Kapow Gai. Throw a "Pet Maak" on the end to specify extra spicy -- "pad kapow gai pet maak".

Kang Karie - I usually see this one romanized into G's instead of K's. Usually "gaeng gallee" (I'd argue that is the best phonetic guide also). "Kang"/"Gaeng" means "curry", and "Gallee" is a specific type of curry. However, point of interest, "gallee" also means "whore". This Thai homonym is responsible for menu translations like the one you can see here. To explain that link, "gallee" curry comes in powder form. The Thai word/phrase for gallee curry powder is "foong gallee". Run that through google translate or the like, and instead of getting "gallee curry powder" you get "whore dust". This is a source of great amusement to Thais, making fun of their friends when ordering, etc.

Chicken Satay - not originally a Thai thing (loooong time ago), but it is very popular here now. In the US I always heard it said like "saw-tay", but in Thailand it sounds more like "SUH-tae". Chicken satay is available, but generally more popular among foreigners here. In areas without a large farang (western foreigner) population, 99% of the time satay will be pork. I actually like the pork version better now. Anyway, in Thai chicken satay would sound like "gai suhtae" and pork would sound like "moo suhtae".

In all seriousness I think this is pretty incredible. They're using an artificial larynx, windpipe, mouth and lips to create phonemes.

So the next step would be to apply some sort of grammar reorganization to the translation. This is already being done by some text translation software so it shouldn't be too hard.

Ultimately, you should be able to grab phoneme samples on the fly from the speaker and reproduce the translated speach in the speakers own voice. This will be a really cool technology one day.