DoCoMo launches cloud-based translator phone service in Japan

For those who travel to many different countries, attempting to get your message across to the locals who don’t speak your language is a frustrating experience, even more so when you attempt to make a phone call and they can’t see you attempt to gesture what you mean. Well DoCoMo has the answer for that in the form of their cloud-based translator phone service, which as the name implies will translate a foreign language in real-time to another language.

This process is said to take up to two seconds, which while may not be as natural as a conversation is definitely better than nothing! Unfortunately at the moment the service appears to only support the translation of Japanese to English and vice versa, with DoCoMo boasting 90% accuracy for Japanese, while English accuracy is set at 80%, which while not as high is still pretty impressive.

The service is currently being offered as a trial run from now until March 2012, and if all goes well, the translator service is expected to launch on a commercial scale and will be available to customers after the fiscal year 2012.