Asiajin

Real time speech translation is the hot topic in last few days because of Google’s speech-to-speech translation development news and our reported Japanese government experiment. However, translation among human languages seems far behind Canis language translation, you can tell if you are a native dog language speaker (unfortunately I am not).

BowLingual, Dog-to-human language translator which got The 2002 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, is planned to be released for iPhone in summer 2010, Tokyo-based Index Corporation announced [J].

The latest BowLingual will have Twitter support, by which dog owners can send what their puppy says to the world directly on iPhone. The owner can also send dog’s photo and their comments, which is supposed to make dog owners networking.

BowLingual was bundled to one model of Vodaphone cellphone in 2003 (Ketai Watch) [J], but did not go on another Japanese cellphones at that time.

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Japan has a plethora of TV channels, but the biggest battleship is NHK [JP], the country’s national public broadcasting organization. NHK itself operates a number of different channels, and one of them, NHK World TV, has just released an English app for the iPhone/iPod touch [App Store link].

NHK World is the international broadcasting service of NHK, offers programs in English and is primarily aimed at the overseas market. Their free app enables you to watch NHK World live, meaning you can access the channel’s entire program from anywhere in the world on your iPhone or iPod touch. (There are some exceptions for reasons of copyright.)

Just fire the app up and you can instantly start watching the program. This works even over 3G, even though you (obviously) get better video and sound quality via Wi-Fi (the app’s official description says that up to about 9.5MB of data can be received every 10 minutes via 3G). The app itself is just 2MB and includes a program schedule.

Japan’s large industry is notoriously anti-web, but NHK has been cautiously opening up to the web in recent months. It was the nation’s first major TV network that started putting contents online on an own channel on Youtube (NHKOnline). More recently, the broadcaster also announced it will live-stream events from the upcoming Winter Olympics NHK doesn’t show on TV on a dedicated website.

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Different language, different application. That is not an exclusive phenomenon for web services like Facebook against Japanese big 3. The most popular P2P file sharing software on Japanese web is not BitTorrent.

First, it was western WinMX follower Winny. When Winny network caused chaos on society by virus (which uploaded private and enterprise files under Windows’ “My Documents” from companies and government organizations) and arrests.

The development of Winny was stopped, and P2P users migrated to Share. After some allegations by uploading copyrighted movies on Share, Perfect Dark, which began at end of 2006 and boasts its higher anonymity, has been taking the position of the former two.

screenshot by a blogger shinn_asuka_impulse

On January 27th, the first person who distributed copyrighted animation films over Perfect Dark network was arrested in Saitama prefecture. [J]

From the beginning of this year 2010, downloading illegal contents became crime by revised copyright law. Until 2009, only uploading side was illegal. However, this accusation is not by this extended download, but by upload.

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NICT(National Institute of Information and Communication Technology)’s Master Project, which stands for “Multi-lingual Advanced Speech and Text reseARch Project” are running an experiment on multilingual (Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean) real-time translation system.

NICT has an English and other language pages to explain the whole experiment, which are and will be done in 5 different regions in Japan.

All of those tourist areas offer real time (1-2 seconds delay at most) machine translation in speech-to-speech, speech-to-text and text-to-speech services for foreign visitors for free.

At one of them, Yamanashi prefecture’s experiment with NEC and JTB Global Marketing & Travel Inc., not only offers “Handheld mobile type” and “regular PC set” but also provides “Scouter type” with which you can wear on your face and see the translated texts.

I am not sure how practical both voice recognition and Japanese-English machine translation, because even text-to-text machine translation gives me very bad results (for example). I want to try it if they come to Tokyo.

[Update 2010-02-08] Just one and a half days later, Google is reported to be developing speech-to-speech translation service on cellphones. So is this Japanese system years ahead? (I think both systems are and will be so limited, especially between distant languages like English-Japanese.)

See Also:

NEC’s release on the Yamanashi experiment [J]

NEC’s “Tele Scouter” product page [J]

ITPro’s report [J]

Tags: Japan, Technology // 4 Comments »

Japan’s legendary reality television show comes back with heavy usage of Twitter.

Denpa Shonen 2010 (Denpa Shonen = Radio-Wave Boy), a successor program of the Susume Denpa Shonen, which started in 1992, is running their new program under the same producer (Producer T).

The program name is “Denpa Shonen 2010 – Hito-wa Tsubuyaki Dakede Ikite Ikeruka?” [J]. The subtitle means “Can people live on Twitter alone?”.

It started on January 25th and will continue for 2 months. On the game, two commanders direct two pair of comedians to drive around Japan, to take points to win under some rules.

All commands and communications should be done by Twitter. This scene is when one pair gets the next command on Twitter.

The rule of the game, which is subject to change, is posted here [J]. The basic rules are,

• You lose if you violate traffic laws.
• Cover all living expenses by Twitter.
• No cash is allowed to have.
• The team gets more points win.

Additional rules provides how to get points. For example, the first one to be able to take a photo of Toyota dealer in the directed city acquires 500 points. (Toyota provides 2 corolla as a main sponsor)

There are more and more rules added every day to avoid possible problems, such like not recording copyrighted music as background, because broadcasting will be restricted by them, etc.

Hashtag #denpa2010 seems to be used a lot by those directors, competitors and TV watchers.

See Also:

Reality Television on Wikipedia

Susunu Denpa Shonen (sequel of the first one) on English Wikipedia

Tags: Japan // 2 Comments »