back to article 'Instant translation' glasses to come online for 2020 Olympics

NTT Docomo has wasted no time ramping up the excitement ahead of the Tokyo Olympic Games, in announcing a 5G network 100 times faster than LTE and augmented reality “instant translation” glasses – both of which should be ready by 2020. Both innovations were unveiled at IT and electronics show CEATEC 2013 in Tokyo this week. …

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  1. Craig 28

    I'm wary of how effective the glasses would be but the potential even without the translation feature for someone like me who was visually impaired would be enormous if they worked. There are already apps and services via smartphone which claim to OCR things such as menus but having it built into glasses would be very convenient, plus the additional ease in recognising who just said hello to you when you didn't recognise their voice (which can be very difficult in a lot of cases) would be absolutely fantastic.

    As for 5G, meh. I can't even get 3G here and even if I could 500mb of data a month wouldn't go terribly far.

  2. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    Instant translation glasses

    What, no Babel fish? Anyway, might be very useful for people who not very familiar with Kanji.

  3. Frankee Llonnygog

    Super abroad speak spectacles

    for enjoy beautiful human life!

    1. NP-HARD

      Re: Super abroad speak spectacles

      my hilarity buttocks are out loud!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    algorithms will have to be spot on

    they will be - eventually, but not this time yet. But they will get there, of course, possibly soon after AI wakes up. At which point (maybe a millisecond later) it will put us to sleep, for the sake of ultimate environment optimization. So maybe no need for those translation glasses after all...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Never mind the quality, feel the speed

    Solving the speed problem would seem to be achievable, and it would be fantastic if they can make it work, but I have reservations that they will solve the speed issue, but then struggle with the quality of machine translation.

    Untrained speech recognition software will get you perhaps 95% word recognition at best, possibly a whole lot less for real world on-the-fly commentary. In my experience the quality of speech recognition hasn't changed remarkably over the past decade. But when it does have a problem, it won't just create an error like a typo, it will typically insert grammatically correct words for the errors, that then feed into the translation software with interesting results. And that's before we consider the quality of software translation. If Google Translate is anything to go by, then I'd guess we're talking about 75% accuracy.

    Any reason to believe that the recognition and translation accuracy will improve in time for 2020, other than vague hopes founded on Moore's Law?

    1. It'sa Mea... Mario

      Re: Never mind the quality, feel the speed

      is for written words not spoken.. speech recognition not an issue here, though fancy/decorative fonts might be..

  6. Allan George Dyer

    Hungarian phrasebook anyone?

    What could possibly go wrong?

    My nipples explode with delight!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My hovercraft is full of eels

  8. s. pam Silver badge
    Flame

    No Russians were harmed....

    Clearly with the Anti-Gay, Anti-Rock, Anti-almost-anything era the Russians are now in, these won't be needed as everyone will be blinded beforehand...

  9. Kubla Cant
    Unhappy

    3G...4G...5G

    ...the wireless component of mobile networks gets faster and faster.

    Meanwhile, the UK mobile operators continue to link their base stations to the internet with wet string, and charge £20 for sloooow delivery of a Gib of data over this pathetic infrastructure.

    Forgive me if I don't get excited.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 3G...4G...5G

      Wet string!!!

      We DREAM of a connection with wet string...

      Must go, my smoke signal just dropped out again.

  10. Sheep!

    5g of speed...

    ..would at least get ME moving very quickly..

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