Robotic Hand Translates Speech into Sign Language

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.'"

How to sign First Post?

[A Dafa Disciple]

Good lord! I imagine the Japanese language [wikipedia.org] with its 1945+ character alphabet is hard enough to learn; learning Japanese sign language must really suck.

You know what would really spoil those deaf kids is, instead of a robot doing sign language, a robot that shows images or words based on what a speaker says. I know, I know; creating a robot to do this is a feat within itself and impressive in its own right, but perhaps there are better ways of communicating with a robot if it can already perform more than adequate speech recognition.

Does it also distinguish...

[MadJo]

... Does it also distinguish between different 'dialects' in sign language?
I seem to recall that sign languages differ between countries, same as 'natural' language.

However this is really great for deaf people.

The article makes no sense

[MobyDisk]

...that can covert spoken words and simple phrases into sign language...

Ignoring the spelling, this implies that it has speech recognition. It converts SPOKEN words.

...recognizes the 50-character hiragana syllabary and about 10 simple phrases such as "ohayo" (good morning)...

Hiragana is the Japanese phonetic alphabet, so it READS. Huh? Now, does it read only 10 simple phrases, or does it read anything plus it recognizes 10 simple audio phrases. I guess the breakthrough is the hand articulation and the idea, not the rest.

Signing, but not reading

[QMO]

After reading a couple of replies to my parent post, I was thinking about people that might understand signing, but not read or hear.

It is my understanding that children can learn to sign before they can learn to read. (In fact hearing children can learn to sign before learning to speak.)

Similarly, developmentally challenged people, such as certain people with Down's Syndrome, never learn to read, but can sign just fine.

Reading takes certain specific brain functions, and it is not inconceivable that there are people who have had head trauma that damaged the reading part of their brain, and the hearing part, but can still understand sign language.

These are just quick thoughts and may have lots of holes, and little sense. Please feel free to expand/correct/flame/whatever.

Recognziing Sign Language

[SWroclawski]

There's a researcher [gallaudet.edu] at Gallaudet working on the other side of this equation with a system designed to recognize sign langauge, which seems like a much harder problem.

ASL isn't like English in that there are always specific words- a lot of it has to do with spacial context (where in the signing space the sign was made) and a whole class of signs that don't translate directly into words (they're hand shapes which can translate into an event or a description of an object or set of objects).

And, as the research page shows, facial expressions and even facial movements can be part of a sign.

Of course, this is American Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language may be very different.