NEC Develops World's First Cell Phone Real-time Translator
November 30, 2007 12:17 PM | Technology | Comments (0)
| NEC Corp., a Japanese electronics company, today announced that they have created the world's first real-time Japanese to English cell phone translator. One second after the phone hears speech in Japanese, it displays it in text on the screen and then one second later, the text is shown in English. The company claims that its cell phone translator is the first in the world that automatically translates without external help. The translator software, which includes a voice-recognition system and translation functions, is compact enough to operate on a small microchip mounted in a cell phone. The software can recognize about 50,000 Japanese words and is designed for smooth translation of travel phrases such as "Can I have a subway route map?” The phone isn't designed as yet to convert from English to Japanese. NEC is currently studying how to recognize voices on the phone accurately. One problem is how the person on the other side of the line could know if his or her words are being translated correctly. |  |
NEC hasn't decided when the technology will be ready for commercialization and hopes that someday the technology can be used for people around the world to communicate with each other, regardless of their language.
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