NEC's interpreter robot

NEC claims to have developed the world's first robot capable of acting as an interpreter. The PaPeRo has been around for a couple of years, during which time NEC has been displaying it at trade shows and lending it out to families, working on improving its responses in real-life situations; the result is a robot that can recognise faces and carry on a conversation after a fashion, and can even access the Internet to boost its knowledge. The latest version incorporates the ability to differentiate between several thousand distinct voices and understand what's being said to it irrespective of differences in pronunciation. To have it interpret a sentence you speak into a transceiver mike in Japanese and the robot analyses the words and speaks an English version.

Given the limitations of machine translation and the size of the dictionary (25,000 words in English and 50,000 in Japanese) we don't imagine this is going to be much use in the real world, but it might be interesting for things like teaching basic vocabulary to kids.

[Via the Yomiuri Shimbun (Japanese)]