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Francis Tan
Francis Tan is the Asia editor of TNW, who is based in the Philippines. He is particularly interested in Asian Internet startups, social me Francis Tan is the Asia editor of TNW, who is based in the Philippines. He is particularly interested in Asian Internet startups, social media and e-commerce. Get in touch with him via Twitter @francistan or Email [email protected].
While people around the world have been struggling to learn foreign languages, Japanese operator NTT Docomo just demonstrated a cloud-based automatic interpretation service that interprets voice in real-time.
During the demo, the Docomo staff read a newspaper article in Japanese, which is then interpreted to English in real-time, which is to a receiving device. It was made possible by integrating of a range of the best existing technologies from around the world — such as voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis.
Voice recognition and translation accuracy is still not 100% but the level of inaccuracy is pretty much acceptable. Docomo plans to recruit people to monitor the service and offer it on a trial basis within the year.
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