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.'"

Comments

Re:How to sign First Post?

[tpgp]

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

The relationship between a language & sign language does not work like that.

From the wikipedia sign language page

A common misconception is that sign languages are somehow dependent on oral languages, that is, that they are oral language spelled out in gesture, or that they were invented by hearing people

and

On the whole, deaf sign languages are independent of oral languages and follow their own paths of developmental. For example, British Sign Language and American Sign Language are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of Britain and America share the same oral language.

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.

That doesn't really sound like a robot, but speech recognition software connected to a teleprompter (or monitor)

Re:Over Kill?

[tpgp]

Call me culturally insensitive but, why not simply translate speech to text?

Because signing is the native 'tongue' for most deaf people - and it is easier for them to communicate using sign language (over text) - just as its easier for you to understand speech (over text).

Basically - the same reason that some British TV (and undoubtedly many other channels around the world) have a signer translating the news rather then scrolling text.