It's been a long time coming and even though TAG's role is minor, it's still important.

Yes, you read it correctly and we are not talking about Maxwell Smart's shoe-phone but the same thing you see in the original Star Trek. There are many flip-phones in existence and they owe their look and feel to the "Communicator".

Although you cannot walk into Wall-Mart and pick one up just yet, remember what Nathan Myhrvold said about products in development. They always need to be 10 years away. If you tell people 5 they want to start booking orders and if you tell say more than 10 everyone knows they're just imaginary. Well this product could be a reality in less than 3 years and each piece of required technology is available right now.

Speech-to-Text, Translation and Text-to-Speech

The first thing you need to be able to do is convert speech into text, something any person can do easily with the speech recognition built in to Windows 7. If you want to test it on your Windows Mobile device, try using the latest bing for mobile. It also works on your Blackberry device. In fact, translation is not occurring on the phone. Instead, the audio is sent across the wire and text is returned but in our case we need to send it for translation anyway.

Next you need to be able to translate text from one language to another. At last count, an online search for "web translation" returned over 63 million hits and hundreds of sites and services do translation. Or if you are viewing this in IE then you can simply highlight the text and select the translation accelerator. You can also see a simple demonstration of translating the text of an entire section in our discussion about translation elsewhere on this site.

Finally, we need the ability to convert text back to voice. The process of synthesizing text into speech has been around for years, constantly improving. There are countless text readers available for the desktops, laptops and mobile devices. However, we have not included an example because at present, it would involve sending files to your device but you can try an example from AT&T Labs. Oh and just remember; if you are asked, "Would you like to play a game?" say no.

At this point, you would have to admit that there are a number of there required pieces already in place. Are they perfect? No but some services are becoming much more useable. Are they ready for prime time? No, not yet but they are ready for testing. Many companies are doing just that. However, there remains one issue aside from all these other technical requirements and that is, how to connect devices.

TAG has a role to play

If you are in a situation where you need translation then most likely you will have difficulty getting someone who does not speak your language to understand that you want to communicate. If you do get that much across, how do you propose to make all the necessary adjustments to connect to your two phones? That is where TAG comes in.

Remember, the primary function of the reader software on your phone is to read information from a physical source. When you display a TAG on your device and show it to another person, all you need them to do is understand that they need to read it on their device and let the phones handle the details.

TAG could even become the new universal greeting, a way to say hello to anyone, anywhere. You display a TAG; the other person reads it and receives information and instructions in their own language. It might even become the modern day equivalent of Haight-Ashbury's "hey baby, what's your sign". Except in this case, your sign will be a TAG.

This last part of the puzzle, involves a custom application that would capture the device IP and then package it up with the other required information and send it off to a service that would return a TAG that contained the connection information. Not so difficult, our QRenderM allows you to select one of your contacts and display them as a QR Code on your phone.

Once the TAG is read, a new functionality in the TAG reader would invoke the service allowing communication. In the same way that a URL results in redirection to a website and phone number queues up a phone call, the new TAG would have its own functionality.

Now setting up such a service is a little more challenging but if you like to create your own you can look into the concepts behind WCF and Service Bus and BizTalk Services or just follow along with this video.

Now if you are still not convinced that this technology could soon find it's way into a new version of Instant Messenger, then perhaps the people at either Dial Directions or Sakhr Software can convince you.