TokyoTomo Travel Guide

JTB Global Marketing and Travel Inc. (JTBGMT) started a substantive experiment of multilingual automatic speech translation technology in Yamanashi Prefecture from January 25 through February 21 in collaboration with NEC and National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). In this experiment – four languages of Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean being the subject tongues – they examine the usefulness of automated speech translation system for the tourism industry by lending its terminals to foreign tourists visiting Mt. Fuji and other popular spots of interest in the neighborhood. Proper nouns relating to the places and facilities are already loaded into the system, but the field test will find out how broadly they have to cover in vocabularies and sentence patters for tourism whereby they will study the scope of its potential for the industry.

The terminals are available in three modes: wearable, mobile, and stationary. The wearable one is good for face-to-face conversation by putting it on physically. It is a convenient tool for foreign visitors when they speak to attendants at tourist facilities or vice versa. Mobile terminal is easy to carry, so it can be used at hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops while they are walking. Stationary type is used at receptionist desk and concierge desk at the hotel, or checkout counter of souvenir shops, or tourist information counter. It comes in laptop computer with large monitor screen so that service staff and foreign tourists could talk to each other via the translation system, watching the same screen.

Source: Travel Vision

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