Tokyo, January 5, 2009 – NEC Corporation announced today the development of automatic software for mobile phones that quickly and accurately provides interpretation of words and phrases commonly
associated with travel.

The new software is specialized for compact mobile phone CPUs and provides automatic interpretation from Japanese to English and English to Japanese. Demonstrations of the software have been embedded in NEC mobile phones (Note: 1), which independently provide interpretation without the need for network connections or outside servers.
Furthermore, only a few moments are required for the software to recognize a word or phrase before an interpretation is conveniently displayed.

Today’s announcement stems from NEC’s successful development of a high precision “compact and scalable voice recognition engine” (Note: 2) and a “lexical-rule-based translation device” (Note: 3).

(1)High Precision Voice Recognition The accuracy of NEC’s voice recognition software under noisy conditions (Note: 4, MBW) has been significantly improved, while the size of the device has been considerably reduced.

(2)Improved Voice Recognition and Translation Engine Accuracy NEC has significantly improved the range of words and expressions recognized by the device through an expanded database that has not increased the size of the product.

(3)Embedded Mobile Phone Interpretation Technology The accuracy, speed and capacity of both the voice recognition and
automatic interpretation engines have been significantly improved and adapted for mobile. Furthermore, in addition to existing Japanese to English interpretation, English to Japanese interpretation as also been developed.

NEC’s travel focused automatic interpretation technology can quickly and accurately bring individuals one step closer to overcoming English-Japanese communication barriers, and helps to create links throughout society by capitalizing on information.

Looking forward, NEC aims to continue reinforcing its voice recognition and language processing technologies, which provide reliable interpretation support for individuals regardless of time or location.

(Note: 1) NEC prototype mobile phone
(Note: 2) Compact and Scalable Speech Recognition Engine: A high precision and compact voice recognition engine developed by NEC using its independent voice recognition formula.
(Note: 3) Lexical-Rule-Based Translation Device: An automatic translation engine developed using NEC’s independent translation methodology that integrates dictionary information and grammatical rules.
(Note: 4) MBW (Model-Based Wiener Filter) MBW is an independently developed NEC noise recognition technique that
alleviates the impact of background noise.