NEC Corporation developed a Japanese-English/English-Japanese automatic speech translation software for single-chip multi-core processors for small devices such as mobile phones.

NEC verified the high-speed automatic speech translation processing capability of its software on NEC Electronics’ MP211 application processor for mobile phones, at an operating frequency of 200MHz, proving that operation of interpretation applications is technologically feasible on small devices like mobile phones.

The software has a 50,000-word vocabulary and realizes automatic speech-to-speech interpretation of travel conversation through the development of a new parallel speech recognition method for single-chip processors with several CPU cores and a lexical-rule-based machine translation engine that unites dictionaries with grammar. The dictionary stores each word’s lexical rules that can be expanded to general translation rules or to individual translation rules for fixed form expression.

The features of this software include:

This software is a new step after NEC’s automatic Japanese – English/English – Japanese translation software for notebook PCs in 1999, “Tabitsu” (communication software supporting English travel conversation), in 2001 and PDA-operational Japanese – English travel conversation, automatic speech translation software in 2002.