Hands on With the PSP Talkman Translator 126
PSP News writes "Lik Sang has a review and hands on of Sonys new Talkman accessory for the PSP, which enables translation of 4 of the worlds most spoken languages. From the article: 'Traveling and meeting people from all around the globe sure is fun, but may have its drawbacks when you're not speaking the language. To ease this barrier, innovation comes via Sony which took ScanSoft's speech recognition software and created both an universal language interpreter and trainer for English and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean.'"
Re:so basically (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, for the next generation of handhelds, I can see a huge opportunity for really great language learning games. Nintendo could probably pull it off. Imagine having to control a character through an adventure game by voice, where each level forces you to learn new vocabulary. ("Take the blue book" "push the button on the largest robot" "thinly slice the duck, and sautee it in a plum sauce until golden brown, then serve on the china with a floral pattern."
With a built-in dictionary, and lesson-tutor modes. Also, handwriting recognition with the touch screen. , to help you learn the alphabet of the language. Maybe FMV snippets, so you can see real dialogs with visual cues. Having interactivity could really improve the learning process, if it were done right. If you are pronouncing a vowell sound wrong, it could give you extra tutoring. Visual cues could help you understand a scene without having to resort to your native tongue as much as a pimsleur audio tape, improving your immersion. Seeing bad results of your commands could help you organise the difference between similar sounding words, which would be very abstract in a classrom, or with a text book. "Flip the cup." (character turns over soffee cup, dumping it on ground) "No, dammit, I meant SIP from the cup." (Helpful animation appears split screen showing both what the character needs to do, and the word that the player used, with text at the bottom stating the verb.) Obviously, you couldn't make it perfectly intelligent so that It would be able to make sense of every wrong statement, but you could get a lot of generic animations for verbs, and models for nouns which could be shown when the player fails to use the right word.
Re:hm (Score:3, Interesting)
But seriously: whom would you prefer to do business with - the guy who constantly tinkers with his PSP, or the other guy who actually bothered to learn your language?
Re:Too bad those are not the most spoken languages (Score:4, Interesting)
those numbers for english don't even add up well when you consider that there are at least 4 english speaking countries I can think of, UK, US, Canada, and Australia. I believe there are three African countries that speak english nad then New Zealand but I'm not positive.
Those numbers ignore the millions of people in India nad China who learn english. In india, it is required to get into college(as they all are taught in english).
Re:Too bad those are not the most spoken languages (Score:4, Interesting)
Chinese is not Chinese. I worked at a company that employed several Chinese engineers. While they could all read the same newspaper, they couldn't all talk to each other. Those from the south (Hong Kong and surrounding area) couldn't understand those from the north.
Also, the population of Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and the U.K. is > 322,000,000 and while you could subtract the minorities in the U.S. and Canada that don't speak English, you're still missing the 300,000,000+ in India who speak English. Throw in all the other places where English is known, to some usable degree, as a secondary language and you're probably looking at 750,000,000+ speakers.
It is also, along with Spanish and French, one of the most widely dispersed languages in the world. There may be a ton of Bengali speakers, but I'll be 95% of them are in the Bengal region of North-Eastern India and the surrounding area.
And then consider this is a Sony Japan product. Their market -- East Asia -- deals mostly in (surprise) East Asian languages and English.
-Charles
Re:Too bad those are not the most spoken languages (Score:4, Interesting)
English is becoming very popular in Asia just as a bridge language. Chinese may not be able to speak to Taiwanese or Hong Kong people, but if everyone knows a little English, they can get by (and do business with Europe, consequently).