App translates calls; new future for teleconferencing
A new app in Japan will translate phone conversations into foreign languages
A new app in Japan will translate phone conversations into foreign languages
The difficulty in understanding foreign languages, let alone the painstaking process of learning a new one, could be about to end with the launch of a new application that will translate live speech.
The app, developed by Japan’s largest telecom company NTT Docomo, will be able to convert phone conversations from Japanese into English, Mandarin, and Korean, according to the BBC. The company hopes to launch additional languages in the future.
The attractiveness to such a technological advancement is obviously huge, with language proving the biggest barrier between many cross-border business dealings. Many firms pay considerable fees to translation companies and multilingual staff, and so such a new technology could help drastically reduce costs.
The Hanashite Hon’yaku app will be available on phones running Google’s Android operating system from the beginning of next month. Obviously the technology is in the early stages of development, however, and so will not likely offer exact translations.
In a statement, NTT Docomo said: “French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai will be added for this application in late November, raising the number of non-Japanese languages to ten.
The voice recognition software works in a similar fashion to Apple’s Siri platform, which pushes the speech onto the company’s servers where it is translated.
“Fast and accurate translations are possible with any smartphone, regardless of device specifications, because Hanashite Hon’yaku utilises Docomo’s cloud for processing.”
Other firms believed to be developing similar systems include Lexifone, Vocre, Alacatel-Lucent and Microsoft. Google have heavily invested in their online translation service Google Translate, and are also believed to be developing similar advancements.
There are obviously huge opportunities in making live phone conversations translate, easing miscommunication issues when doing business internationally. Whether the accuracy of the system is quite ready remains to be seen.
