atr matrix 1999

Automatic Speech Translation system for the task of Hotel Reservation. Developed from 1997-1999 at Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory Interpreting Telecommunications Laboratory between Kyoto and Nara.

The announcer is Karuna Shinsho. Others who appear in the video are Yoko Shibata (speaking Japanese with headset microphone), and Andrew Finch (the English guy typing on the keyboard in his office), and a solo from Seiichi Yamamoto, who was the president of ATR ITL at the time.

This was recorded by VHS from NHK in Japan. Sorry I don't have good software to edit the VOB file, I'll reupload it when I can.

In 1997 version 1 of this came about as my second practice with the Python rapid prototyping language. I have nothing but praise for it. The following 2 years were pretty much just tuning, mods, and my balancing the workload for each module among my staff of 5 programmers. Yeah, I was the only American - we had mostly Japanese, and a couple of Germans in the group.

In 1999 it was expanded to connect to the C-star-2 network, and the Japanese input was sent to speech synthesizers at CMU (English), CRIN (French), Karlsruhe (German), ETRI (Korean), and IRST (Italian). Each of them connected with an input segment in their own language, and we had a fun videoconference on July 22, 1999 (JST). The press was present. If anyone has a video of that, I would certainly appreciate receiving a copy.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• atr
• matrix
• speech
• translation
• japanese
• english