NEC Develops Speech-to-Speech Translation Software for Mobile Phones

NEC Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in the development of Japanese-English/English-Japanese, automatic speech translation software for single-chip multi-core processors for small devices such as mobile phones, capable of operation at high speeds with low power consumption.

NEC verified the high-speed automatic speech translation processing capability of this software on NEC Electronics' MP211 application processor for mobile phones, at an operating frequency of 200MHz, proving that operation of interpretation applications is technologically feasible on small devices like mobile phones.

Supporting a 50,000-word rich vocabulary, this software realizes automatic speech-to-speech interpretation of travel conversation through the development of a new parallel speech recognition method for single-chip processors with several CPU cores, and a compact, lexical-rule-based, machine translation engine that unites dictionaries with grammar that is operable on small devices.

The features of this software include:

(1) A parallel, large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition engine, which is built with a database consisting of a wide-range of conversation sounds and words that enables accurate speech recognition of spoken words.

(2) A lexical-rule-based, machine translation engine, which achieves high-performance translation of spoken words utilizing dictionaries/grammar, compiled from a wide range of language knowledge data.

(3) An advanced wave-concatenative speech synthesis engine, which realizes high-performance reading through an advanced, wave-concatenative speech synthesis method based on a wide-range of speech data.

(4) A total integration module that controls collaborative operation of the speech recognition engine, the machine translation engine, and the speech synthesis engine realizing automatic translation on a single processor for mobile phones.

With the advancement of an information society and increased freedom of movement across borders, the dynamic development of technology supporting automatic speech interpretation and translation to support communication between different languages is rapidly progressing.

Source: NEC

Related stories:

Braille converter bridges the information gap
A free, e-mail-based service that translates text into Braille and audio recordings is helping to bridge the information gap for blind and visually impaired people, giving them quick and easy access to books, news articles and web pages.
Honda Introduces All-New Insight Dedicated Hybrid Concept Vehicle at Paris Motor Show
Honda Motor presented the concept model of its all-new Insight dedicated hybrid vehicle scheduled to be introduced in 2009, at the 2008 Paris Motor Show.
Bringing down the language barrier... automatically
Progress being made by European researchers on automatic speech-to-speech translation technology could help the EU tackle one of the biggest remaining boundaries to internal trade, mobility and the free exchange of information – language.
Fast-learning computer translates from four languages
Modern approaches to machine translation between languages require the use of a large ‘corpus’ of literature in each language. Now a European project has demonstrated a cheaper solution which compares favourably with the market leaders in translating from Dutch, German, Greek or Spanish into English.
Linguist tunes in to pitch processing in brain
More of the brain is busy processing pitch from language and other sounds than previously thought, according to a researcher in neurophonetics at Purdue University.
MIT develops lecture search engine to aid students
Imagine you are taking an introductory biology course. You're studying for an exam and realize it would be helpful to revisit the professor's explanation of RNA interference. Fortunately for you, a digital recording of the lecture is online, but the 10-minute explanation you want is buried in a 90-minute lecture you don't have time to watch.
3-D avatar may help doctors improve care
IBM scientists have created software that allows physicians to use an avatar to obtain medical data in the same manner in which they interact with patients.
Evaluations aim to advance translation technology
Wartime military patrols and civilian encounters can be especially dangerous if neither group understands the other’s language. To help American forces secure critical information and communicate with the local population, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers are evaluating prototype, real-time, two-way translation systems for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

News discussion:

Technology news