4Development of the Automatically-Interpreting Phone

  NTT has released an appli that automatically translates conversations in 10 different languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, and French. They say that it can be used at meetings and during phone calls.

 Accuracy is said to be at 90% for Japanese and 80% for English. By using a database in the cloud, it will likely improve rapidly. After some time of being able to translate on the web using Google Translate, the ability to use such a feature in conversation is finally here.

I’m impressed. I was actually the 1^st person to be involved with the development of the automatically-translating phone.

In 1985, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications announced a “Master Plan for the Development of the Automatically-Translating Phone.” I was a coordinator. It was my first task after entering the government.

 The previous year, while working as a bureaucrat, I was sent to the frontline of negotiations with the US over the liberalization of telecommunications. When the privatization of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone yielded the government 2 trillion yen, there was competition within the government to create a project with a gigantic research and development budget. Due to lack of sufficient manpower, I was put in charge even though I was new.

 We were to make a system that combined voice entry, machine translation, and speech synthesis. It would require the construction of a huge database. This project was the first of its kind. I organized a research meeting with academia and related business circles, with professor Nagao of Kyoto University as the chairman, and formed a plan.

There was much political strife during development, and while building up a promotional organization I only slept for 10 hours per week until the end of the year. Having such an experience during the first year of my employment was one of the most valuable experiences of my life. Yoshio Utsumi, my boss at the time, later became the secretary general of the UN’s ITU (International Telecommunication Union). He was 42 years old at the time. In the old days, even young officials did great work.  22-year-old and a 42-year-old did this work.

 In the end, investment institutions set up research centers to facilitate the development of the required fundamental technologies, and the ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International) was set up in Keihanna Science City. ATR eventually grew to become a world famous research center.

 Thirty years have passed since then. Another thing that impresses me is that the form of the device is completely different from what we had imagined at the time. I had envisioned a black phone with lines connected to foreigners who would do the interpreting. At the time, the cost of a call between Japan and the US was 1,530 yen/minute. Development at the time was centered around KDD’s research lab, which had a legal monopoly on international calls.

 However, when the idea finally became reality it was on a mobile device called a “smartphone” using a communication network called the “internet” for next-to-nothing. What’s more, rather than just talk to a person overseas, you can now see them as well, and the translation is carried out over the internet. The developer wasn’t KDD, but a descendant of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph. Media certainly is interesting.