NEW YORK -- Soldiers and humanitarian workers in Iraq may soon get high-tech help in communicating more effectively with the locals.

Could this new piece of technology save lives in Iraq?

The MASTOR is IBM's multilingual automatic speech-to-speech translator. The company says it’s giving the U.S. military 1,000 handheld devices and 10,000 copies of the software for laptops for use in the Middle East.

IBM says it's making the $45 million donation because several employees who've done work or served in Iraq say one of the top hurdles over there is a shortage of qualified human translators.

“One of the main things they told us was the need for communication between all the elements in Iraq with the Iraqi citizens,” said David Nahamoo of IBM Research.

“The communication essentially happens in a sequential fashion. The English is spoken; Arabic is spoken out. Arabic is spoken; English is spoken out, and back and forth,” said Nahamoo, describing how the MASTOR works. “The thing that we display on the screen gives me the options that maybe the top choice wasn't the right one, the third choice was the right one, so I can choose the third one."

But some soldiers aren't terribly gung-ho about the idea of technology taking over for humans. Army Sergeant Frank Merola, a local news cameraman in Westchester, New York, saw a good cross section of the action in Iraq, serving as a cameraman over there for a year for military television.

“I think anything that would help troops do their job more efficiently will be more beneficial no doubt about it, but there's no replacement for a person,” said U.S. Army Sgt. Frank Merola. “A person can pick up on nuances that a computer can't. They can pick up on tone, they can pick up on culture, they can get a feel for an area a lot better than a computer can.”

IBM says since the technology is still in development, and initially they don't really see it being used in high stress situations like soldiers going to door to door but instead for more humanitarian causes like in hospitals.

The company also says it's just designed to fill in where there are shortages.

The Department of Defense wouldn't respond to calls and e-mails asking where they might use the translators and if they're even allowed to accept them, since IBM is one of several companies developing translators they may eventually try to sell to the Armed Forces.