Yesterday, Dan Gillmor mentioned in his eJournal a new Japanese cell phone equipped with a very useful GPS system. He wished that the service was translated into other languages and that these phones were available for rent. A somewhat similar service is just being launched at Narita Airport, where you will be able to rent PDAs which can translate your language into Japanese. The application is based on speech-to-speech technology developed by NEC and implemented in small robots named PaPeRo (Partner-Type Personal Robot), according to BBC News Online.
PaPeRo is the first all-hearing, all-seeing robot to be able to talk in conversational colloquialisms.
Here is PaPeRo's face (Credit: NEC).
The PDA hire scheme is part of a wider project, e-Airport, to make Japan's main international airport the most hi-tech in the world.
Here are some more details about how the technology is implemented.
As well as being able to understand and imitate human behaviour, PaPeRo (Partner-Type Personal Robot), is the first robot to translate verbally between two languages in colloquial tongue.
It can cope, in other words, with slang and local chatter, and has a vocabulary of 50,000 Japanese and 25,000 English travel and tourism related words.
After PaPeRo demonstrated its translation ability, the PDAs borrowed its brain and tongue. Users can talk into the device and it will talk back in almost-perfect Japanese in a second.
It has voice recognition, digital voice translation and a voice synthesiser to talk to users, explained Chris Shimizu, NEC's corporate relations manager, and the quality of the voice spoken back to users is much more human than robotic.
For more information about the small robot, visit PaPeRo's Home Page.
Here is a group of these small robots (Credit: NEC).
Sources: Dan Gillmor's eJournal, March 3, 2004; BBC News Online, March 4, 2004
3:07:41 PM
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