Robotic Hand Translates Speech into Sign Language 135
usermilk writes "Robot educators Keita Matsuo and Hirotsugu Sakai have created a robot hand that translate the spoken word into sign language for the deaf. From the article: 'A microchip in the robot recognizes the 50-character hiragana syllabary and about 10 simple phrases such as "ohayo" (good morning) and sends the information to a central computer, which sends commands to 18 micromotors in the joints of the robotic hand, translating the sound it hears into sign language.'"
Over Kill? (Score:5, Insightful)
More Useful As Software (Score:4, Insightful)
Deaf people could carry a PDA, and when they need to find out what someone is saying, they can hold the PDA up like a microphone, and watch the screen, assuming the translation is at least reasonable accurate...
Of course they could lipread too but some find that harder than others, and this could also be used eventually to cross language barriers?
I imagine it's extremely hard to lipread a foreign language.
A different dept. (Score:1, Insightful)
Text is not the same (Score:3, Insightful)
American Sign Language is not English (American or other).
Thus, translating speech to ASL would reach people that that understand ASL but don't read Englih.
Oh for heaven's sake... (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead of trying to analyze these achievements in the rather constricted mould of "Why not 3D graphics" or "Why not text on a screen", consider the use of this technology in the future - when say, the robots to help disabled people finally get off the assembly lines. By then, this process would've been refined to the point of being able to do an excellent job in communications.
As a researcher in the field of robotics, a lot of work which I do or goes on around me, has definite implications - if not now, atleast in the next decade or so. And don't we owe to ourselves to look at developments such as this just for the *sake of the development itself*?
I bet deaf people hate it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ASL users and bad reading (Score:2, Insightful)
But kids don't spontaneously pick up on writing. What you are asking these deaf children to do is learn ASL (which is basically not written), and the written form of a foreign language. That's like only hearing English (no writing) and only seeing written Chinese (no speaking). That's tricky to learn, and almost impossible to do without extensive training.