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

Recognziing Sign Language

[SWroclawski]

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.