“New technology that allows computers to recognise any language without pre-learning stands to revolutionise automatic speech recognition. … The Norwegian researchers have demonstrated that the production of human speech is fundamentally the same across languages. As such, the technology being developed will be applicable to any language without being reliant on speech data for each individual language to train a machine. The researchers based their approach on phonetics – that is, the study of the sounds of human speech. They have also incorporated additional speech and language knowledge into the system, for example the correspondence between sound frequency and words and how words are put together in forming sentences.” Read more at