NEC Corp believes it is a step closer to realising the dream of recently-retired chairman Kobayashi’s dream of an automatic language interpretation telephone: the system being to be presented at Telecom 91 in Geneva next week is claimed to be able to interpret naturally-spoken Japanese and English into the other language, and conversations in French and Spanish can be monitored; the demonstration system is based on technology announced in January 1991 for an automatic interpretation machine which involves three stages – speaker-independent speech recognition, which uses a proprietary technology called the Demi-Syllable Unit Method; the Pivot kernel of the system which translates from an intermediate artificial language called Interlingua, and clear and conversational speech synthesis, using another method developed by NEC, called Pitch Control Residual Waveform Method; sounds very impressive.
