We had a chance to see NEC’s functional version of their mobile Automatic Speech Translation (自動通訳) software this week. With a 50,000 word vocabulary, the software can be specially designed for different purposes such as travel and business.
The demo shown in the video is of the travel version on a DoCoMo phone which NEC sees as being useful for Japanese who need instant phrase translation instead of single words as most electronic dictionaries do. The average translation time from Japanese to English/Chinese is two seconds to recognize the Japanese and fourteen for the complete translation.
Michael is the Editor of JapanTrends.com and Director of the 
