Fujitsu has recently made an announcement regarding the addition of multilingual translation functionality to the Software LiveTalk, which is a tool for the hearing impaired. The Diversity Communication Tool has been made available in Japan from 8th March 2017 onwards. 

 

LiveTalk is a software that recognizes the speaker’s words, in situations like an office meeting or school lesson, and displays the spoken words in the form of text on multiple devices. This allows real-time communication for everyone including the people with hearing impairments. 

 

The previous versions of software only supported Japanese but the addition of multilingual speech recognition and AI-equipped translation engine immediately display translations as text. Fujitsu and Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory are aiming to offer LiveTalk so as to facilitate communication among a diverse group in various situations like information booths at international events, tourist sites, or business meetings where multiples languages are spoken. 

 

 

 

• Apart from Japanese, LiveTalk now supports 18 other languages that include: English, Chinese (traditional), Chinese (simplified), French, Arabic, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Finnish, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Danish, German, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Catalan. 

 

• Users simply have to set their preferred language and the speaker’s words will be translated to that language. There is no need to set the speaker’s language and there is no limit to the number of combinations of languages used in a group conversation. 

 

• Even if multiple speakers are talking at the same time, the system would be able to distinguish and translate the spoken words. 

 

• The system works for both keyboard input as well as speech input which enables hearing-impaired people to participate. 

 

• The system displays translation results parallel with the speech so that speakers can communicate at a normal conversational tempo. 

 

• The technology eliminates time lag and offers a low-stress communication environment as compared to the existing tools.