The robot can translate from Japanese to English, and the other way around.
I guess the biggest question is, can it really? We all know how crappy most voice recognition is...
"Good Morning" -> "Ohayo"
"Anata ni aete ureshii" -> "Nice to meet you"
It is a robot that can translate. on the 28th of December, NEC presented a new robot. They simply took their robot that can recognize faces and communicate, the "PaPeRo," and slapped thousands of people's voices for recognition and understanding. NEC also added a system that can detect changes in pronunciation and still manage to understand the correct meaning.
In the past, there has been a robot that can produce translations on screens and such, when you said something to it. There has also been a robot that can reply with certain predefined expressions (in Japanese) when you went and talked to it. But, this is the first time there is actually a robot that can translate the conversation itself.
Just spit out some Japanese into the wireless microphone type thing, and the robot will break down what you had to say. It will figure out the subject, verbs, and other sentence elements, and choose the correct English translation out of its internal dictionary of over 25,000 words. It can also translate from English to Japanese. There are about 50,000 Japanese words recorded.
Original Article:
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/main/news/20031229i101.htm [1] <<<There is also a picture at that link.
