Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Good lord! I imagine the Japanese language 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.
Falun Dafa is good!
There's a researcher 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.